[PRL] AOP questions

[Johan]

>> On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, John Clements wrote:
>> 
>>> 2) "Join Points": It appears to me that join points are not truly
>>> points, but are rather contiguous subsequences.  I say this
>>> because of the existence of things like "around" and "after"
>>> pcds, which don't make sense for a definition of join points as
>>> single points in a program's execution.  Is this fair?

yes.

I've always thought of joinpoints as representing subtrees of the
dynamic execution path.

What you do with these trees: splice in something at the root(s)
(around), fork another branch at the root (before/after), modify the
leaves (cflow and friends), is the advice. The point is that the jp is
the entire tree.   Misnomer due to historically focussing on static
joinpoints.

The tree looking like a graph also got karl's brain thinking of more
precise / abstract / reusable ways of specifying said dynamic joinpoints.

(continued from end of email: introducing programming with come-from 
into the non-joking mainstream)

>>> This seems sad, to me, because abstraction as functional programmers
>>> understand it is all about modeling procedures as relations from
>>> inputs to outputs, not as sequences of execution states.  This model
>>> seems like a giant step backward from true abstraction back toward
>>> FORTRAN-style subroutines.  Am I just crazy?

If we're going to charge AOP with any backsliding, it would be towards