On the Interaction of Advices and Raw Types in AspectJ

The latest versions of AspectJ, the most popular aspect-oriented extension for Java, must cope with the complex changes that occurred in the Java type system, specially with those that introduced type parameters for classes and methods. In this work we study the influence of raw types, i.e. parameterless instantiations of class types, over the semantics of an AspectJ-like language. As a result, we define an operational semantics and a type system for a calculus, named Raw Aspect Featherweight Generic Java (Raw-AFGJ), that represents a minimal aspect-oriented extension of Raw Featherweight Generic Java. Through our calculus it is possible to achieve a better understanding of several subtleties of aspect weaving with the restrictions imposed by raw types support in the type system.