A Short Overview of AspectL

AspectL adds a number of features to the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) that have been developed in the recent years in the AOSD community. According to the Lisp spirit, some of them have been generalized in the process of translating them to Common Lisp. These generalizations are likely to be interesting for designers of other aspectoriented programming languages as well since the bulk of AspectL does not rely on Common Lisp specifics. However, this paper requires at least a general understanding of CLOS, as for example provided in the overviews by DeMichiel and Gabriel [2] and Gabriel, White and Bobrow [5]. Especially the notion of generic functions that are collections of methods, and the fact that it is the generic functions and not the methods that are called should be well understood. An understanding of the CLOS Metaobject Protocol (MOP) is not required it is only mentioned in notes that are not essential to the rest of the presentation.