Open bisimulation for aspects

Abstract

We define bisimilarity for an aspect extension of the untyped lambda calculus and prove that it is sound and complete for contextual reasoning about programs. The language we study is very small, yet powerful enough to encode mutable references and a range of temporal pointcuts. We extend formal studies of Open Modules to this more general setting. Examples suggest that aspects are amenable to techniques developed for stateful higher-order programs. To our knowledge, this is the first study of coinductive reasoning principles for aspect programs. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.