Supporting Aspects in Program Storage

The fundamental abstractions used by the majority of programming languages to store computer programs has not changed significantly in 40 years. Software configuration management systems reflect this, forcing a unidimensional file-based decomposition of the system for storage purposes. By applying the same techniques of indirection that have driven programming design to program storage, an SCM system can provide a collection of facilities that I call multidimensional software configuration management, which both resembles and supports aspect-oriented software development. In this paper, I will describe Stellation, a new system under development at IBM Research, and how it supports multidimensional software configuration management.