[abc] new abstract (fwd)

Slight additions to last para ???

AOSD abstract proposal:

Research in the design of aspect-oriented programming languages
requires a workbench that facilitates easy experimentation with
new language features and implementation techniques. In particular,
new features for AspectJ have been proposed that require extensions
in many dimensions: syntax, type checking, code generation and
dataflow and control flow analyses.

The AspectBench Compiler (abc) is an implementation of such a workbench.
The base version of abc implements the full AspectJ language.
Its frontend is itself built using the Polyglot framework, and it is
itself a modular extension of Java. The use of Polyglot
gives flexibility of syntax and typechecking.
The backend is built using the Soot framework, to give modular code
generation and analyses.

In this paper we outline the design of abc, focusing mostly on how
the design supports extensibility. We then provide a general overview of how
to use abc to implement an extension. Finally,
we illustrate the extension mechanisms of abc through a number of
small, yet non-trivial examples. abc is freely available under
GNU LGPL.
Received on Thu Sep 23 12:09:58 2004