Abstract

OFL (Open Flexible Languages) is the name of a meta-model for object-oriented programming languages based on classes. It relies on three essential concepts of these languages: the descriptions which are a generalisation of the notion of class, the relationships such as inheritance or aggregation and the languages themselves. OFL provides a customisation (hyper-genericity) of these three concepts in order to adapt their operational semantics to the programmer’s needs. So, at first reading the OFL approach can be summed up as the search for a set of parameters whose value determines the operational semantics of an object-oriented language based on classes. One of the main goals of OFL is to describe existing object-oriented languages such as Java [Fla99, GJSG00], Eiffel [Mey97], or C++ [Str97] in order to be able to extend them according to two directions. On the first hand, we want to extend the language itself by adding new concepts and more especially new inter-classes relationships (like a multiple inheritance relationship in Java) [CCL01]. On the other hand, we wish to extend the language with new orthogonal services (for example persistent object handling). In this paper we focus on the second direction. When designing and programming applications, people often need additional services in order to handle object evolution, persistence, distribution of data, etc. One of the most interesting approach is to use aspectoriented

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