Nicolas Tabareau
ABSTRACT
Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) started ten years ago with the remark that modularization of so-called crosscutting functionalities is a fundamental problem for the engineering of large-scale applications. Originating at Xerox PARC, this observation has sparked the development of a new style of programming featured that is gradually gaining traction, as it is the case for the related concept of code injection, in the guise of frameworks such as Swing and Google Guice. However, AOP lacks theoretical foundations to clarify this new idea. This paper proposes to put a bridge between AOP and the notion of 2-category to enhance the conceptual understanding of AOP. Starting from the connection between the !-calculus and the theory of categories, we propose to see an aspect as a morphism between morphisms'that is as a program that transforms the execution of a program. To make this connection precise, we develop an advised !-calculus that provides an internal language for 2-categories and show how it can be used as a base for the definition of the weaving mechanism of a realistic functional AOP language, called MinAML
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Index Terms
- Aspect oriented programming: a language for 2-categories
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Reviews
Jacques Carette
There is a continuing struggle to deal with Dijkstra's "separation of concerns" in an appropriately modular manner. It is an interesting problem in that it is both completely solved (at the design level) and rather open (at the implementation level). Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been touted as a solution for this problem. But, in practice, AOP has turned out to provide solutions as well as new problems. If one uses a traditional notion of modularization of modules as based on information hiding, then AOP has deservedly been called anti-modular. Furthermore, while it has at least one quite mature implementation in AspectJ, there are no good semantic formalizations available that would give AOP a satisfying theoretical foundation. This work firmly attempts to deal with that last problem. The theory brought to bear is not light: 2-categories. More precisely, there is an attempt to mimic the work done on categorical semantics of the lambda calculus. There, it was found that the internal language of a Cartesian closed category was (essentially) the simply typed lambda calculus. It is natural to explore the same question for 2-categories. The novelty claimed here is that this corresponds to some sort of aspect language. And this is where things start to fall apart: in this rather short (five-page) paper, crucial ideas, and certainly proofs, are omitted. Since there is a much longer version in existence, and the workshop also accepted long papers, one wonders why only a short version was published. Furthermore, while it is convincing that the internal language of a 2-category adds certain features for program transformation, it is quite a large stretch to claim that this corresponds to "aspects." Lastly, the gulf between practice (aspects on top of object-oriented languages) and this theory (program transformations on top of the lambda calculus) is enormous, and it is not clear how it will be bridged. I cannot decide whether this is an early paper on the semantics of AOP showing interesting insights, or a vain attempt to use fancy mathematics to explain AOP. There are insights here, but they seem to be about program transformation, not about AOP. Online Computing Reviews Service
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