Section 2.7. RELATED WORK

2.7. RELATED WORK

Earlier versions of these ideas have been expressed at the AOP workshops in Minneapolis [19] and Budapest [17]. Those publications have sparked a certain amount of discussion on the foundational question of the nature of aspect-oriented programming. Wand describes aspect-orientation as an alternative specification language for programs [40]. He argues that aspects are modular units of specification and that a join-point model is a shared ontology between programs and aspects. Masuhara and Kiczales examined four AOP languages, attempting to extract the essence of their AOPness through understanding their interpretation/weaving process [34]. There have also been numerous examples of providing denotational semantics for AOP, particularly when restricted to advice on functions. A good source for discussions of this kind is the series of "Foundations of Aspect-Oriented Languages" (FOAL) workshops at the AOSD conference [31, 32, 33].