Concern
|
|
In computer science, a concern is a problem which a program tries to solve. Programmers write programs in order to address one or more core concerns (such as credit card billing, or sending email), whereas cross-cutting concerns form aspects of a program that do not relate to the core concerns directly, but which proper program execution nevertheless requires.
Separation of concerns (SOC) forms an important goal in program design. When programmers simply insert calls to cross-cutting concerns (such as logging, object persistence, etc.) everywhere in the source code where needed, the resultant program leads to a highly-coupled system and one difficult to change, because every time programmers change a feature of these cross-cutting concerns, they may need to recompile a lot of source files and check a lot of calls for consistency. And every time coders change the signature of an operation, they have to change all calls to that operation, again touching many separate source files.
Isolating these cross-cutting concerns forms the goal of aspect-oriented programming.