Reasoning about aspects with common sense

Abstract

There has been a lot of debate about the modularity of aspectoriented programs, and in particular the ability to reason about such programs in a modular way, although it has never been defined precisely what modular reasoning means. This work analyzes what it means to reason about a program, and separates "modular reasoning" into several well-defined properties of a reasoning model.A comparison of an OO language semantics with an AO language semantics with respect to these properties reveals that explanations of AOP that are based on weaving are a major obstacle to reasoning about AO programs in a modular way. We argue that a more modular semantics that is easier to reason about can be given to AO programs if we renounce the monotonicity of the corresponding reasoning system -a sacrifice that is well-known in artificial intelligence to model "common sense" reasoning. More generally, we claim that AOP should be understood as a form of nonmonotonic knowledge representation.

Model-driven development for early aspects

“…Nevertheless, aspect-oriented techniques do not promise to improve other quality factors beyond these ones [105]. Regarding other issues, such as performance, aspect-oriented techniques usually claim to be at least not worse than existing ones 15 , and in other cases, such as understandability, they even acknowledge that they can be more complex than in non-aspect-oriented systems [64,80]. We believe that this is the price we must pay for an improved modularization.…”

Empowering Non-conservative Parallelizing Refactoring by Non-monotonic Reasoning

“…Relation (12) suggests that any change in how a loop traverses the iteration space must be accompanied by two communication phases if parallelization targets a distributed-memory system. Relation (13) suggests that any weaving of code that sends/scatters data must be followed by weaving of code that receives/gathers data.…”

“…Nonmonotonicity in weaving has also been observed in [13]. While [13] rises important issues regarding the nature of the weaving process we approach parallelization through defeasible transformations [2], [3].…”

Modular aspect-oriented design with XPIs

“…2005; Dantas and Walker 2006;Ostermann 2008]. First, our designers had to inspect all the code to identify the relevant join points for the PCDs to encompass.…”

“…At a high-level objective often is to classify whether a change is innocuous. Earlier strand of such work can be seen in Clifton and Leavens's classification of aspects into what they call observers and assistants [Clifton and Leavens ] followed by Krishnamurthi, Fishler, and Greenberg's work on verifying advice modularly [Krishnamurthi et al 2004 [Steimann 2006], and most recently Ostermann's work on applying default logic to reason about aspects [Ostermann 2008]. Compared to these techniques, basic goals of our XPI-based strategy is to facilitate such decomposition of systems into aspects that is inherently easy to evolve.…”