[aspectl-announce] [ANN] New version of AspectL

[Pascal Costanza]

New versions of the libraries in the Closer Project have been  
released, including the Closer to MOP compatibility layer for the  
CLOS MOP and the ContextL extension for Context-oriented Programming.

Furthermore, AspectL has been moved to the Closer Project, with its  
new version 0.7. Previously, it was an independent project that I  
haven't maintained anymore. Now that bitrot has started to increase,  
I have ported it to the Closer to MOP layer which turned out to be a  
surprisingly smooth process. This especially means that the number of  
Common Lisp implementations that it runs on has increased.

Two bugs in Allegro Common Lisp that have led to problems in  
conjunction with AspectL have also been fixed in the meantime: A bug  
that has prevented a non-special slot to be turned into a special  
slot has been fixed in Allegro 7.0 and 8.0, and the limitation that a  
defmethod form doesn't accept more than one qualifier has been fixed  
in Allegro 8.0. Allegro Common Lisp 8.0 now supports the full  
functionality of AspectL.

Furthermore, the following changes have been made to AspectL:

- Some of the functionality was previously ported from AspectL to  
ContextL, mostly because it is not genuine aspect-oriented  
functionality. Those parts are now removed from AspectL  
implementation-wise in order to avoid code duplication. Instead,  
AspectL imports that functionality from ContextL, and exports it  
again for compatibility reasons. Existing AspectL code should mostly  
work as before.

- Likewise, the CLOS MOP wrappers are completely removed because  
Closer to MOP supports compatibility across different CLOS MOP  
implementations much better.

- Finally, the package structure is much simplified. Instead of  
placing every functionality in its own package, there is now the  
(previously already available) ASPECTL package from which everything  
can be imported. The previous scheme was too complicated and offered  
no obvious advantages.

See http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/ for the Closer Project and  
http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/aspectl.html for AspectL.

Pascal

-- 
Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc at p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium