Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader asks: "I have read some of the stuff on Eiffel, watched their tutorial videos about design by contract, and the entire thing sounds like a pretty good idea. However, the problem is that we don't use Eiffel at work, and I highly doubt I could get people to come around to the idea of switching to it. Although we use a lot of C++, I can imagine that a lot of the ideas from Eiffel can be applied there. I have looked around on the net and found a few articles talking about different ways of applying design by contract using assert statements and the like. I also found the dlib C++ library on SourceForge which, among other things, puts a design by contract face on a lot of API calls. So, there are obviously people doing it. What is everyone's experience with Design by Contract in C++? What tools are there that help make it a workable system? Lastly, are there any pitfalls to taking this approach in C++?"

WeiszNet writes "Bertrand Meyer, the creator of Eiffel the language and CTO of Eiffel Software in Santa Barbara, CA has announced in his Software Architecture course at ETH Zurich that the company's flagship product - EiffelStudio was released under the GPL today. Here is the press release: and the project's page. Eiffel is an object oriented programming language supporting contracts. Last year the international standard (ECMA) for Eiffel was released and now the initiative to go open has been taken."

name_already_in_use writes "Eiffel Software released their object-oriented programming environment for Mac OS X. It is a powerful language offering all the usual O-O wonders as well as few unique features of it's own (Design by Contract, generics). All compiled code can be run on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and of course now Mac OS X, so there's no need to re-write code for different architectures."

name_already_in_use writes "Eiffel Software released their object-oriented programming environment for Mac OS X. It is a powerful language offering all the usual O-O wonders as well as few unique features of it's own (Design by Contract, generics). All compiled code can be run on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and of course now Mac OS X, so there's no need to re-write code for different architectures."

Admiral Akbar writes "It seems today is the release date of the best damn free IDE available today for Linux,EiffelStudio version 5.3, they have both a free and Enterprise version available. Why Eiffel's not classed as a mainstream language is beyond me, goodies include full concurrent engineering, amazing debugging, browsing and documentation facilities that even your dog would find easy use, plus a Mac OS X version is in the works with a beta available for download soon. Design by Contract here I come!"

Admiral Akbar writes "It seems today is the release date of the best damn free IDE available today for Linux,EiffelStudio version 5.3, they have both a free and Enterprise version available. Why Eiffel's not classed as a mainstream language is beyond me, goodies include full concurrent engineering, amazing debugging, browsing and documentation facilities that even your dog would find easy use, plus a Mac OS X version is in the works with a beta available for download soon. Design by Contract here I come!"

sniesen writes "ISE finally released EiffelStudio 5.2 for Linux (and other UNIXes) today. There's free non-commercial editions available for both Windows and Linux. It's good to see that the best O-O language available still strives quite a bit."

hardcorebit asks: "Interactive Software Engineering has announced that a version of the Eiffel programming language, called Eiffel# is available for Microsoft's .NET initiative. The .NET framework provides a common type system and inheritance mechanism for different languages. The claim is that Eiffel# programmers can use this to seamlessly integrate code from other programming languages, across networks, and so on. The only thing is that .NET doesn't support multiple implementation inheritance, so Eiffel# currently lacks this feature. There are one or two other differences as well. I'm not an Eiffel expert, so I'd like to know whether the missing features matter and if so, how much." First C# and now Eiffel#...is Microsoft trying to wrap some of the more popular languages in it's .NET initiative? If so, how effective can it be if Microsoft is leaving out features like multiple inheritance and the ability to redefine features in descendant classes?

hardcorebit asks: "Interactive Software Engineering has announced that a version of the Eiffel programming language, called Eiffel# is available for Microsoft's .NET initiative. The .NET framework provides a common type system and inheritance mechanism for different languages. The claim is that Eiffel# programmers can use this to seamlessly integrate code from other programming languages, across networks, and so on. The only thing is that .NET doesn't support multiple implementation inheritance, so Eiffel# currently lacks this feature. There are one or two other differences as well. I'm not an Eiffel expert, so I'd like to know whether the missing features matter and if so, how much." First C# and now Eiffel#...is Microsoft trying to wrap some of the more popular languages in it's .NET initiative? If so, how effective can it be if Microsoft is leaving out features like multiple inheritance and the ability to redefine features in descendant classes?

Looks like it's time to clear out the quickies again! First, Erv Walter sent us a note about S.u.S.E releasing more X servers. Hmm. S.u.S.E...aren't they those guys who've been hitting us about 13,000 times/day recently? I wonder what kinda soa they drink over there...Next off, David Kindred wrote in to tell us ISE is releasing the source code to Eiffel under an open source license! Maybe I'll have to take a look at that language again. Finally, Promethus sent us a link to a Bill Joy interview. Bill is one legendary man - one of the cofounders of Sun, I believe. A very interesting interview.

Zooko writes " Eiffel, an object oriented programming language, has been getting some good press as an alternative to Java. Today, Interactive Software Engineering, a maker of Eiffel development tools, announced the availability of the latest version of their software for Windows and Linux.

It is nice to see serious support of Linux by a commercial software company. Bertrand Meyer of ISE (and also noted object oriented guru) says: "Linux has been very good to us, and I hope we have been good to Linux too. It's one of our most important commercial platforms. And it's our #1 or #2 development platforms (#2 by a short distance from Windows if you count the number of machines, #1 if you ask developers what they want to develop on...)". See also the GNU Eiffel compiler, SmallEiffel"

Zooko writes " Eiffel, an object oriented programming language, has been getting some good press as an alternative to Java. Today, Interactive Software Engineering, a maker of Eiffel development tools, announced the availability of the latest version of their software for Windows and Linux.

It is nice to see serious support of Linux by a commercial software company. Bertrand Meyer of ISE (and also noted object oriented guru) says: "Linux has been very good to us, and I hope we have been good to Linux too. It's one of our most important commercial platforms. And it's our #1 or #2 development platforms (#2 by a short distance from Windows if you count the number of machines, #1 if you ask developers what they want to develop on...)". See also the GNU Eiffel compiler, SmallEiffel"