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Eiffel

Language type:

O - Object-oriented

Description:

Eiffel is an object-oriented language intended for general application programming. Its syntax is superficially similar to C. Eiffel offers a broad range of OO programming features: inheritance, polymorphism, assertions, exception handling, packaging, generics, and strong type checking.
Eiffel is available from Interactive Software Engineering, Inc. Their commercial Eiffel system compiles Eiffel to interpretable bytecodes (similar to the way Java is compiled), but for efficiency, the bytecodes are usually translated into C code and compiled with platform-specific C compilers.
Newer versions of the Eiffel system include support for interfacing to other languages, and to popular distributed computing schemes like COM and CORBA.

Origin:

Bertrand Meyers, 1986-92.

See Also:

C    C++    Sather    Objective-C   

Remarks:

Eiffel is designed in large part to support program safety and orderly software development, goals also embraced by the Ada community. The class definition syntax is designed to support a software engineering approach called Design by Contract.
Despite Eiffel's simplicity, power, and good performance, it has not met with the broad acceptance of C++ or Java. Why? Possibly because there have not been a variety of free, portable Eiffel compilers, or possibly because programming with Eiffel requires significant coding discipline. Today, Eiffel is gaining some acceptance, but the market for object-oriented development environments is a crowded one.

Links:

http://www.cm.cf.ac.uk/CLE/

http://www.totalweb.co.uk/gustave/faq/index.htm

http://www.sigco.com/

Date:

Last updated 12/16/97

Sample code:

From An Invitation to Eiffel, by Bertrand Meyers


class ACCOUNT feature 
              balance: INTEGER; 
              owner: PERSON;
              minimum_balance: INTEGER is 1000

              open (who: PERSON) is 
                   -- Assign the account to owner who. 
                   do 
                        owner := who 
                   end
              deposit (sum: INTEGER) is 
                   -- Deposit sum into the account. 
                   do 
                        add (sum) 
                   end 
              withdraw (sum: INTEGER) is 
                   -- Withdraw sum from the account. 
                   do 
                        add (-sum) 
                   end 
              may_withdraw (sum: INTEGER): BOOLEAN is 
                   -- Is there enough money to withdraw sum? 
                   do 
                        Result := (balance >= sum + minimum_balance) 
                   end 
         feature {NONE} 
              add (sum: INTEGER) is 
                   -- Add sum to the balance. 
                   do 
                        balance := balance + sum 
                   end 
end -- class ACCOUNT 

Descriptions in this dictionary are ©1997-99 Neal Ziring. Some examples copyright of their respective authors. Some technologies and languages are trademarked. Permission to copy descriptions is granted as long as authorship credit is preserved.

Comments on this dictionary, corrections and suggestions, are all welcome. Please use email, the address is ziring@home.com