Declarative, formal, and extensible syntax definition for AspectJ. A case for scannerless generalized-LR parsing

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is attracting attention from both research and industry, as illustrated by the ever-growing pop-ularity of AspectJ, the de facto standard AOP extension of Java. From a compiler construction perspective, AspectJ is interesting as it is a typical example of a compositional language, i.e. a language composed of a number of separate languages with different syntac-tical styles: in addition to plain Java, AspectJ includes a language for defining pointcuts and one for defining advices. Language com-position represents a non-trivial challenge for conventional parsing techniques. First, combining several languages with different lexi-cal syntax leads to considerable complexity in the lexical states to be processed. Second, as new language features for AOP are being explored, many research proposals are concerned with further ex-tending the AspectJ language, resulting in a need for an extensibl