The aspect-oriented design of the PUMA C/C++ parser framework

Puma is a framework for the development of applications that analyze and, optionally, transform C or C++ source code. It supports ISO C and C++ as well as many language extensions of the GNU Compiler Collection and Microsoft Visual C++. Aspects played an important role during the design and implementation of the framework. It is written in the AspectC++ language. By employing AOSD concepts, we gained a clean separation of concerns and, thereby, very good configurability and extensibility. All these - ilities are of vital importance for our project, because the available manpower for maintenance tasks is limited. This paper briefly describes the design principles behind Puma.