Program refactoring using functional aspects

  • Authors:
  • Sven Apel;Christian Kästner;Don Batory

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Passau, Passau, Germany;University of Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany;University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA

  • Venue:
  • GPCE '08 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Generative programming and component engineering
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

A functional aspect is an aspect that has the semantics of a transformation; it is a function that maps a program to an advised program. Functional aspects are composed by function composition. In this paper, we explore functional aspects in the context of aspect-oriented refactoring. We show that refactoring legacy applications using functional aspects is just as flexible and expressive as traditional aspects (functional aspects can be refactored in any order), while having a simpler semantics (aspect composition is just function composition), and causes fewer undesirable interactions between aspects (the number of potential interactions between functional aspects is half the number of potential interactions between traditional aspects). We analyze several aspect-oriented programs of different sizes to support our claims.