Can We Refactor Conditional Compilation Into Aspects?

Systems software uses conditional compilation to manage crosscutting concerns in a very fine-grained and efficient way, but at the expense of tangled and scattered conditional code. Refactoring of conditional compilation into aspects gets rid of these issues, but it is not clear yet for which patterns of conditional compilation aspects make sense and whether or not current aspect technology is able to express these patterns. To investigate these two problems, this paper presents a graphical "Preprocessor blueprint" model which offers a queryable representation of the syntactical interaction of conditional compilation and the source code.