Implementing Known Concepts in AspectJ

AspectJ is a so-called general-purpose aspect-language which tries to solve the problem of crosscutting code. An often uttered criticism of AspectJ is that there is no underlying concept in the implemented language features and that those features are rather arbitrary chosen instead of being based on any theoretical foundations. This paper shows beyond the the context of crosscutting and tangling code how known concepts in objectoriented programming languages can be implemented in AspectJ and argues in that way that AspectJ generalizes a large variety of features which are already known in the objectoriented world. The argumentation is based on the concepts of mixin classes, multidispatching and negative type information which can be implemented by using a small set of AspectJ idioms.