On the need for setpoints
Rubén Altman, Alan Cyment, Nicolás Kicillof · 2005
Pointcuts are currently defined in most aspect-oriented frameworks either by way of laborious enumeration or by referring to some structural property of the code. This coarse way of quantifying reduces program evolvability, supposedly one of the advantages of AOP. We believe that a strong decoupling of concerns will only be achieved when pointcut definition mechanisms are provided that rely on system views other than the program code. Structure-based pointcuts must evolve into setpoints, semantic pointcuts. It is the main purpose of this paper to further explain this concept and to present SetPoint, an AOP environment developed as proof-of-concept for these ideas. General Terms Design, Experimentation, Languages.