Eiffel

language An object-oriented language produced by BertrandMeyer in 1985. Eiffel has classes with multipleinheritance and repeated inheritance, deferred classes

(like Smalltalk's abstract class), and clusters of

classes. Objects can have both static types and dynamictypes. The dynamic type must be a descendant of the static

(declared) type. Dynamic binding resolves multipleinheritance clashes. It has flattened forms of classes, in

which all of the inherited features are added at the same

level and generic classes parametrised by type.

Other features are persistent objects, garbage collection,

exception handling, foreign language interface. Classes

may be equipped with assertions (routine preconditions and

postconditions, class invariants) implementing the theory of

"Design by Contract" and helping produce more reliable

software.

Eiffel is compiled to C. It comes with libraries containing

several hundred classes: data structures and algorithms

(EiffelBase), graphics and user interfaces (EiffelVision) and

language analysis (EiffelLex, EiffelParse).

The first release of Eiffel was release 1.4, introduced at the

first OOPSLA in October 1986. The language proper was first

described in a University of California, Santa Barbara report

dated September 1985.

Eiffel is available, with different libraries, from several

sources including Interactive Software Engineering, USA (ISE

Eiffel version 3.3); Sig Computer GmbH, Germany (Eiffel/S);

and Tower, Inc., Austin (Tower Eiffel).

The language definition is administered by an open

organisation, the Nonprofit International Consortium for

Eiffel (NICE). There is a standard kernel library.

An Eiffel source checker and compiler front-end is

available.

Latest version: 4.2, as of 1998-10-28.

Latest version: ISE Eiffel version 3.3.

See also Sather, Distributed Eiffel, Lace, shelf.

E-mail: [email protected].

["Eiffel: The Language", Bertrand Meyer, P-H 1992].

(1998-11-15)