A Type-theoretic Interpretation of Pointcuts and Advice
Penn collection
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Contributor
Abstract
This paper defines the semantics of MinAML, an idealized aspect-oriented programming language, by giving a type-directed translation from a user-friendly external language to a compact, well-defined core language. We argue that our framework is an effective way to give semantics to aspect-oriented programming languages in general because the translation eliminates shallow syntactic differences between related constructs and permits definition of a simple and elegant core language. The core language extends the simply-typed lambda calculus with two central new abstractions: explicitly labeled program points and first-class advice. The labels serve both to trigger advice and to mark continuations that the advice may return to. These constructs are defined orthogonally to the other features of the language and we show that our abstractions can be used in both functional and object-oriented contexts. We prove Preservation and Progress lemmas for our core language and show that the translation from MinAML source into core is type-preserving. We also consider several extensions to our basic framework including a general mechanism for analyzing the current call stack.