Features as First-class Entities – Toward a Better Representation of Features
Sagar Sunkle, Marko Rosenmüller, Norbert Siegmund, Syed Saif ur Rahman, Gunter Saake, Sven Apel · 2008
Features are distinguishable characteristics of a system relevant to some stakeholder. A product line is a set of products that differ in terms of features. Features do not have firstclass status in contemporary programming languages (PLs). We argue that various problems related to features are a result of this abstraction and representation mismatch and that features should be elevated to a first-class status. We propose an extension to Java that implements features as first-class entities. We give examples of the syntax and semantics of this extension and explain how the new representation can handle features better.