Mozart and Aspect-Oriented Programming

[Denys Duchier]

pvr at info.ucl.ac.be (Peter Van Roy) writes:

> I know exactly what AspectJ can do.  It does purely syntactic
> manipulations and in my view will never lead to true AOP, which
> needs semantic understanding.  We go MUCH MUCH FARTHER for the
> aspects of distribution and fault tolerance.  We actually SOLVE THE
> PROBLEM.  So why are you picking nits?

Don't get nasty on me.  I was not picking nits.  You were simply
making the wrong claim.  It can happen.

> Please change the title to 'Separation of concerns (aspects)' and
> put the text in.

Sounds better to me.

> Dammit, those AOP guys are masters of media hype.  With epsilon work they
> get their own special issue of CACM.  We have actually SOLVED some of the
> problems that they are still cracking their heads over.  The hordes of AOP
> groupies have a right to know this.

Isn't the claim to fame of AOP that it permits a _modular_ yet
cross-cutting way of addressing aspects?  We don't particulary address
this issue of modularity.  There are many applications of AOP about
which we have nothing to offer.  What we have is probably a better
foundation for e.g. adding fault-tolerance to distributed
applications.  I don't think we solved AOP.  We just have better
solutions to offer for certain problems that AOP attempts to solve.

Cheers,

-- 
Dr. Denys Duchier			Denys.Duchier at ps.uni-sb.de
Forschungsbereich Programmiersysteme	(Programming Systems Lab)
Universitaet des Saarlandes, Geb. 45	http://www.ps.uni-sb.de/~duchier
Postfach 15 11 50			Phone: +49 681 302 5618
66041 Saarbruecken, Germany		Fax:   +49 681 302 5615
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