Symmetric Language-Aware Aspects for Modular Code Generators
Steffen Zschaler, Awais Rashid · 2011
Model-driven engineering, especially using domain-specific languages, allows constructing software from abstractions that are more closely fitted to the problem domain and that better hide technical details of the solution space. Code generation is used to produce executable code from these abstractions, which may result in individual concerns being scattered and tangled throughout the generated code. The challenge, then, becomes how to modularise the code-generator templates to avoid scattering and tangling of concerns within the templates themselves. This paper shows how symmetric, language-aware approaches to aspect orientation can be applied to code generation and how this improves modularisation support, in particular reducing dependencies between code-generation templates, over previously proposed asymmetric aspect-oriented approaches. 1