Anyway, Wes and I resolved the terminology issues off-list and it
appears what I want to do can't be done in AspectJ.
I thought the following code, that we exchanged mail about last night,
does do what you want. In what way doesn't it work?
/*
* Here's an aspect that associates a lot of extra state with
* some target type. But we want to be sure not to allocate
* all that storage unless we really need it. So we use a
* lazy allocation strategy for it.
*/
abstract aspect PersistenceOrSomething {
protected interface HPoS {}; //marker type
//stands for HasPersistenceOrSomething
private static StateBlock {
private Mumble mumble;
private Frotz frotz;
...<many more fields>...
StateBlock() { /*appropriate initialization*/ }
}
private StateBlock Target.state = null;
/* these are the accessor methods for the state */
public Mumble HPoS.getMumble() { return state.mumble; }
public Frotz HPoS.getFrotz () { return state.frotz; }
...<many more accessors>...
