Towards expressive, well-founded and correct Aspect-Oriented Programming

Acknowledgments The lion's share of the results reported on in this thesis has been achieved within OBASCO project atÉcole des Mines de Nantes, to a large part by means of different collaborations involving almost all of my colleagues there. These are acknowledged in the text, as some cooperations with other researchers, as the corresponding work is presented. Here, I would just like to express my gratitude to all of them for having contributed the competences, advice and effort necessary for significant work in a research field that covers much of software engineering as well as related research and application domains. I am much indebted to Pierre Cointe, head of OBASCO project, who has frequently provided me with strategic advice how to orient my research and consistently insisted on me taking on this habilitation work. Special thanks go to Daniel Le Metayer who welcomed me on my arrival in France in Lande group at INRIA/IRISA institute in Rennes and Pascal Fradet who raised and fostered my interest in the rigorous treatment of aspects there. I am also grateful to Claude Labit, director of INRIA-Rennes, for having supported my successful bid for a two-year secondment at INRIA that has provided the necessary leeway to initiate the more recent research directions I am glad to present here. Some of my work has been the result of cooperations or influenced by intense discussions with different foreign researchers. Wim Vanderperren, Theo D'Hondt and Viviane Jonckers from SSEL and PROG groups at Vrije Universiteit Brussel have contributed significantly to some of the results presented here and to my views on the associated research issues. Jan Vitek from Purdue University has always been a good friend whose support and different angle of view on software engineering issues and research in general has proved very helpful over the years. Finally, my most affectionate thanks go to Maël, Thomas and Manue who, in particular, granted me much more of their patience during the last three months than I probably should have asked for. 2 Preface This habilitation thesis presents the main results of my research work conducted as part of OBASCO (" Objects, Aspects, Components ") project, a joint project with INRIA that is also part of the " Labora-toire d'Informatique de Nantes Atlantique " (LINA), in the computer science department ofÉcole des Mines de Nantes. This work has focused on modularization and software evolution problems investigated as part …