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2015 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Modular Reasoning in Aspect-Oriented Languages from a Substitution Perspective

Authors : Tim Molderez, Dirk Janssens

Published in: Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development XII

Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

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Abstract

In object-oriented languages, a notion of behavioural subtyping is needed to enable modular reasoning. This is no longer sufficient when such languages are extended with aspects. In general, all aspects need to be inspected in order to understand the behaviour of a single method or proceed call, which complicates reasoning about aspect-oriented programs. In this paper, we present an approach to modular reasoning that consists of two parts. First, the advice substitution principle, based on behavioural subtyping, identifies when it is possible to remain unaware of an advice while preserving modular reasoning. Second, in cases where it is undesired or impossible to be unaware of an advice, a simple specification clause can be used to restore modular reasoning and to become aware of this advice. We show that our approach effectively enables modular reasoning about pre- and postconditions in a minimal aspect-oriented language called ContractAJ. To ensure the approach is used correctly, we also provide a runtime contract enforcement algorithm that is specified in ContractAJ, and implemented in AspectJ.

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next chapter Propagation of Behavioral Variations with Delegation Proxies
Footnotes
1
An analogous definition of \(\rightharpoonup _{\mathsf {sep}}\) can be given for advice with an execution pointcut.
 
2
Note that execution pointcuts matching on advice executions are also converted into call pointcuts, which is accepted by ContractAJ’s operational semantics as it reuses the dynamic type as static type in advice executions.
 
3
An analogous definition of \(\rightharpoonup _{\mathsf {exec}}\) can be given in case an if construct is already present in the execution pointcut.
 
4
Note that we use two different concatenation symbols to avoid ambiguity. “;” concatenates records in \(\mathcal {J}\) and “+” concatenates tuples in an \(\mathcal {A}\) record.
 
5
The tuple might still be needed in case an around advice makes multiple proceed calls. This is however not supported, as it is an uncommon scenario and would unnecessarily complicate the semantics.
 
6
This definition only applies if all advice are ASP-compliant; it will be extended later in Sect. 5.5 to take into account non-ASP-compliant advice as well.
 
7
An execution pointcut can only be determined dynamically, but we assume that it has already been converted into a call pointcut conjoined with an if construct, as described in Fig. 4 of Sect. 3.1.
 
8
The evaluation of the condition in if pointcut constructs might involve store-altering rule applications. However, this is harmless as we assume that these conditions are free from side effects and always terminate.
 
9
The library and source code are available at: https://​github.​com/​timmolderez/​adbc.
 
10
One caveat is that an advice body should make use of its thisJoinPoint variable in order for it to be available for higher-order advice.
 
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Metadata
Title
Modular Reasoning in Aspect-Oriented Languages from a Substitution Perspective
Authors
Tim Molderez
Dirk Janssens
Copyright Year
2015
Publisher
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Book
Transactions on Aspect-Oriented Software Development XII

Print ISBN: 978-3-662-46733-6

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-662-46734-3

Copyright Year: 2015

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46734-3_1

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