This is a selection of recent papers. For up-to-date information, check the bibliography.

Papers on Aspect-Oriented Programming


[Wand:icfp03]

Mitchell Wand. Understanding Aspects (Extended Abstract). In Proc. ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, August 2003. Summary of invited talk to be given at ICFP 2003.


[WandKiczalesDutchyn03]

Mitchell Wand, Gregor Kiczales, and Christopher Dutchyn. A Semantics for Advice and Dynamic Join Points in Aspect-Oriented Programming. TOPLAS, 2003. to appear. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 9th International Workshop on Foundations of Object-Oriented Languages, January 19, 2002, and at the Workshop on Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages (FOAL), April 22, 2002.

Abstract: A characteristic of aspect-oriented programming, as embodied in AspectJ, is the use of _advice_ to incrementally modify the behavior of a program. An advice declaration specifies an action to be taken whenever some condition arises during the execution of the program. The condition is specified by a formula called a _pointcut designator_ or _pcd_. The events during execution at which advice may be triggered are called _join points_. In this model of aspect-oriented programming, join points are dynamic in that they refer to events during the execution of the program. We give a denotational semantics for a minilanguage that embodies the key features of dynamic join points, pointcut designators, and advice.


[WandLieber02]

Mitchell Wand and Karl Lieberherr. Navigating through Object Graphs Using Local Meta-Information. Unpublished, June 2002.

Abstract: Traversal through object graphs is needed for many programming tasks. We show how this task may be specified declaratively at a high level of abstraction, and we give a simple and intuitive semantics for such specifications. The algorithm is implemented in a Java library called DJ.


[OvlingerWand99]

Johan Ovlinger and Mitchell Wand. A Language for Specifying Recursive Traversals of Object Structures. In Proceeings of the 1999 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA`99), pages 70--81, November 1999.

Abstract: We present a domain-specific language for specifying recursive traversals of object structures, for use with the visitor pattern. Traversals are traditionally specified as iterations, forcing the programmer to adopt an imperative style, or are hard-coded into the program or visitor. Our proposal allows a number of problems best approached by recursive means to be tackled with the visitor pattern, while retaining the benefits of a separate traversal specification.


Mitchell Wand
College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University
360 Huntington Avenue #161CN,
Boston, MA 02115
Internet: wand@ccs.neu.edu
Phone: (617) 373-2072 / Fax: (617) 373-5121

[Programming Languages Group | College of Computer Science | Northeastern University]