AOP: towards a generic framework using program transformation and analysis

What exactly are aspects? How to weave? What are the join points used to anchor aspects into the component program? Is there a general purpose aspect language? We address these questions for a particular but quite general class of aspects: aspects which can be described as static, source-to-source program transformations. We discuss the design of a generic framework to express aspects as syntactic transformations as well as a generic weaver. We also consider how to use semantic properties for the definition of aspects and how to implement these properties using static analysis techniques. As an application of the framework, we sketch how to describe and implement an aspect dealing with program robustness and exceptions.