Complex Systems are intrinsically expensive to develop because several concerns must be addressed simultaneously. Once the development phase is over, these systems are often hard to reuse and evolve because their concerns are intertwined and making apparently small changes force programmers to modify many parts. Moreover, legacy systems are difficult to evolve due to additional problems, including: lack of a well defined architecture, use of several programming languages and paradigms, etc.

Separation of concerns (SoC) techniques such as computational reflection, aspect-oriented programming and subject-oriented programming have been successfully employed to produce systems whose concerns are well separated, thereby facilitating reuse and evolution of system components or systems as a whole. However, a criticism of techniques such as computational reflection is that they may bring about degraded performance compared with conventional software engineering techniques. Besides, it is difficult to precisely evaluate the degree of flexibility for reuse and evolution of systems provided by the adoption of these SoC techniques. Other serious issues come to mind, such as: is the use of these techniques double-edged? Can these systems suffer a ripple effect, whereby a small change in some part has unexpected and potentially dangerous effects on the whole?

The Programming for Separation of Concerns (PSC) track at the 2011 Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) will aim to bring together researchers to share experiences in using SoC techniques, and explore the practical problems of existing tools, environments, etc. The track will address questions like: Can performance degradation be limited? Are unexpected changes dealt with by reflective or aspect-oriented systems? Is there any experience of long term evolution that shows a higher degree of flexibility of systems developed with such techniques? How such techniques cope with architectural erosion? Are these techniques helpful to deal with evolution of legacy systems?
Submissions will be encouraged, but not limited, to the following topics:
Software architectures
Software reuse and evolution of legacy systems
Performance issues for metalevel and aspect-oriented systems
Software engineering tools
Consistency, Integrity, Security
Generative approaches
Analysis and evaluation of software systems
Practical experiences in using reflection, composition filters, aspect- subject- feature- change- orientation
Reflective and aspect-oriented middleware for distributed systems
Modelling of SoC techniques to allow predictable outcomes from their use
Formal methods for metalevel and aspect-oriented systems

Papers can be submitted in electronic format within August the 24th, 2010. Please make sure that the authors name and affiliation do not appear on the submitted paper. For submission instructions refer to http://www.dmi.unict.it/~tramonta/sac