Programming with roles in ObjectTeams/Java

A number of proposals exist how to support the concept of roles at the level of programming languages. While some of these proposals indeed exhibit very promising properties, the concept of roles has not found its way into mainstream pro-gramming languages. We argue that this is due to the rich-ness of the concept of roles and the fact that each existing proposal focusses on some aspects of roles while neglecting others. We present the programming language ObjectTeams/-Java and using the categories of (Steimann 2000) we demon-strate that this language covers more aspects of roles than pre-vious approaches. We suggest that a thoroughly defined pro-gramming language featuring roles may contribute to a better understanding also in other fields using roles