AspectML: A polymorphic aspect-oriented functional programming language

  • Authors:

  • Daniel S. Dantas;David Walker;Geoffrey Washburn;Stephanie Weirich

  • Affiliations:

  • Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;Princeton University, Princeton, NJ;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA;University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS)
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

This article defines AspectML, a typed functional, aspect-oriented programming language. The main contribution of AspectML is the seamless integration of polymorphism, run-time type analysis and aspect-oriented programming language features. In particular, AspectML allows programmers to define type-safe polymorphic advice using pointcuts constructed from a collection of polymorphic join points. AspectML also comes equipped with a type inference algorithm that conservatively extends Hindley--Milner type inference. To support first-class polymorphic point-cut designators, a crucial feature for developing aspect-oriented profiling or logging libraries, the algorithm blends the conventional Hindley--Milner type inference algorithm with a simple form of local type inference. We give our language operational meaning via a type-directed translation into an expressive type-safe intermediate language. Many complexities of the source language are eliminated in this translation, leading to a modular specification of its semantics. One of the novelties of the intermediate language is the definition of polymorphic labels for marking control-flow points. When a set of labels is assembled as a pointcut, the type of each label is an instance of the type of the pointcut.