Modular Program Transformations for Aspect-Oriented Constructs

This work describes a language design experiment in the context of aspect-oriented programming. The core idea was to develop a transformation from high-level language as expressive as AspectJ to a low-level language model, one construct at a time. The key requirement was for these transformations to be modular. The lowlevel language used was a simple aspect language model, named Nu that is based on two primitives bind and remove. Our results show simple modular transformations for a number of control flow, instantiation, and dynamic check constructs and composition operators. Contemporary compilers implement some of these constructs using non-modular code generation techniques. Our results thus have an immediate impact on incremental compilation of aspectoriented programs in that these modular transformations promise to decrease the impact of change for these constructs