On Aspect-Oriented Approaches

Abstract. Several approaches to program construction call themselves aspect-oriented. However, there is still no common agreement on what should be considered aspect orientation. The appealing proposal by Fil-man who summarized it in quantification and obliviousness is considered simplistic by who views aspect orientation as a true new paradigm of software development. This paper drafts a model of aspect-oriented ap-proaches, by showing how major examples of aspect orientation fit in it. The proposed model claims that any aspect-oriented approach is essen-tially a two-step process: a system is initially designed in a traditional way, while a second step is introduced in order to predicate about the entities defined, explicitly or implicitly, during the first step. Therefore, aspect-oriented approaches are in principle devoted to software evolution or augmentation, in contrast to reflective approaches, which uses models of the system during system computations themselves.