A Program Analysis for Tool-supported Refactoring of Aspect-oriented Programs

Aspect-oriented programming (AOP) has been proposed for improving the modularity of implementations that cannot be encapsulated with traditional means, so called crosscutting concerns. It introduces new adaptation concepts that allow the structural extension of implementation modules and the adaptation of existing program behavior. The adaptation concepts are often achieved by new language mechanisms and constructs, such as pointcut and advice. A pointcut specifies where and when an advice is executed by selecting well-defined points in the program execution, so called join points. Every time a join point is executed, some runtime support looks for matching pointcuts. If a matching pointcut is defined, every bound advice is executed. With this complex but powerful mechanism, aspects can declare an adaptation without modifying the source of the adapted implementation module. For selecting a set of join points, a pointcut can specify structural and behavioral properties that have all desired join points in common. These properties are anchored in internal program structures, such as the program’s name space, code containment, inheritance relationships or the