Building Composable Aspect-Specific Languages with Logic Metaprogramming

The goal of aspect-oriented programming is to modularize crosscutting concerns (or aspects) at the code level. These aspects can be defined in either a general-purpose language or in a language that is fine-tuned to a specific aspect in consideration. Aspect-specific languages provide more concise and more readable aspect declarations but are limited to a specific domain. Moreover, multiple aspects may be needed in a single application and combining aspects written in different aspect languages is not an easy task. To solve this combination problem, we represent both aspects and aspect languages as modularized logic metaprograms. These logic modules can be composed in flexible ways to achieve combinations of aspects written in different aspect-specific languages. As such, the advantages of both general-purpose and aspect-specific languages are combined.