A static aspect language for checking design rules

Design rules express constraints on the behavior and structure of a program. These rules can help ensure that a program follows a set of established practices, and avoids certain classes of errors.Design rules often crosscut program structure and enforcing them is emerging as an important application domain for Aspect Oriented Programming. For many interesting design rules, current general purpose AOP languages lack the expressiveness to characterize them statically and enforce them at compile time.We have developed a domain specific language called Program Description Logic (PDL). PDL allows succinct declarative definitions of programmatic structures which correspond to design rule violations. PDL is based on a fully static and expressive pointcut language. PDL pointcuts allow characterizing a wide range of design rules without sacrificing static verification.We evaluate PDL by comparing it to FxCop, an industrial strength tool for checking design rules.