Ideally, we would separate concerns by designing a program so that each
concern is contained in a module. Unfortunately, we often have to deal with
concerns that cannot be modularized, but instead cross-cut modules of our
primary decomposition. Some of the cross-cutting concerns can be separated
using compositional techniques such as Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) that
weave code into modules at specified program points. Here, we focus on
cross-cutting concerns that would not be easily separable with code weaving
compositional techniques due to their frequent and complex interactions with
the modules of primary decomposition. Separation of Concerns (SoC) and
genericity are two important Software Engineering principles to better
control software complexity during development, maintenance, and reuse. In
this paper, we study the interplay between these two principles, showing that
there is an overlapping area where the goals of SoC and genericity, as well
as means to achieve these goals, are the same. We make a case that by
integrating the principles of SoC and genericity we can achieve
non-redundancy, and at the same time enhance the visibility of inseparable
concerns, offering a weaker, but still useful form of SoC. We illustrate the
points we make with examples of program representations built with the
Adaptive Reuse Technique (ART) that supports both SoC and generic mechanisms.
On interplay between separation of concerns and genericity principles: Beyond code weaving
