I use this insight as the underlying driver behind my thoughts about aspect orientation. The class exposes a facet to more than one aspect of the system,
an aspect here being the group of facets that support some system role. I'm
designing a data definition language called ADL (Aspect Definition Language)
which properly supports facet isolation at a data modelling level.
However, to map that to procedural constructs requires a complete rework of
lifecycle concepts from typical O-O languages. I don't know of a language
which provides support for isolating the implementation of facets of a single
class though. An object may be constructed without all of its facets being
"realised". A facet may then later be realised to an existing object. As I
see it currently, this requires the RDB notion of key (attributes that form a
unique identifier), but I'm still working with that.
In any case, I'd like to know if anyone else is thinking down these lines.
(Yes, I'm aware of www.aosd.net - not much of the work indexed there seems to
attempt the things I'm after).
