A semantics for advice and dynamic join points in aspect-oriented programming

A characteristic of aspect-oriented programming, as embodied in AspectJ, is the use of advice and pointcuts to define behavior that crosscuts the structure of the rest of the code. The events during execution at which advice may execute are called join points. A pointcut is a set of join points. An advice is an action to be taken at the join points in a particular pointcut. In this model of aspect-oriented programming, join points are dynamic in that they refer to events during the flow of execution of the program. We give a denotational semantics for a minilanguage that embodies the key features of dynamic join points, pointcuts, and advice. This is the first semantics for aspect-oriented programming that handles dynamic join points and recursive procedures. It is intended as a baseline semantics against which future correctness results may be measured.