magdeburg.de

Features are distinguishable characteristics of a system rele-vant to some stakeholder. A product line is a set of products that differ in terms of features. Features do not have first-class status in contemporary programming languages (PLs). We argue that various problems related to features are a re-sult of this abstraction and representation mismatch and that features should be elevated to a first-class status. We propose an extension to Java that implements features as first-class entities. We give examples of the syntax and semantics of this extension and explain how the new representation can handle features better