SmartEiffel 1.0 Released

Per Wigren writes "Today SmartEiffel, the GNU Eiffel-compiler finally reached 1.0! Eiffel is a very underrated language in the free software community for some strange reason.. Hopefully this will help to gain some interest in this extremely powerful, fast, easy-to-read, easy-to-learn, almost self-debugging language!"

Comments

is there

[mehfu]

an implementatation of the towers of hanoi in eiffel? is it free (as in liberty?)

what's it good for?

[brandonfpu]

as perl started out great for scripting stuff and has grown, java started out with the promise of write once, run anywhere, what is eiffel's main strength according to it's developers (any users out here?)

Re:what's it good for?

[edhall]

I'd not call it is "forced" Object Orientation, but rather it is OO plus pre- and post-conditions in a methodology known as Design By Contract.

-Ed

Re:what's it good for?

[J. Random Software]

Funny you should mention that. Eiffel's the only language I've seen that actually gets boxing right. Any class can be "expanded" when declared or even used, and then it's transparently handled by value instead of by reference.

Re:what's it good for?

[the_mystic_on_slack]

Well, as a current student at the University of Notre Dame, Eiffel was used in our Data Structures course. We basically had two options, Eiffel or C++. Not a lot of people picked up on Eiffel simply because they were stubborn. But as a whole, the Eiffel coders had consistently better projects and overall success. It's purely O-O, so that takes some getting used to. The Design By Contract is an excellent tool for writing perfect code the first time, thus getting a larger systems to market faster. And the libraries that are available are excellent. The STL is simply not good enough relative to EiffelBase. Bertrand Meyer, founder of Eiffel Software, gave three distinguished lectures here this week, and another to our class, and he's very convincing when it comes to his methodologies. It's a great language for teaching O-O and Contracts. Additionally, the same code runs on multiple platforms, and EiffelStudio is available for free for Windows and Linux. EiffelVision also makes it possible to create GUI's that will compile on Windows and Unix too.

Re:what's it good for?

[g4dget]

One of the things people should learn about OOP is when not to use it. If you force them to, they'll end up using it inappropriately.

Re:what's it good for?

[HiThere]

What's it good for?

It lets you ensure that the program you write does what you intend. (This is called Design by Contract. It works better than any alternative I've encountered.)

It manages multiple inheritance and limited generics in a way that C++ can't even try to approach. (Ada can do it, but it's a lot more work.)

And despite what has been said earlier, it isn't a memory hog during compilation. Not compared with the current competition. (Unless you are comparing it with C, of course.)

It's got a built-in garbage collector. Many languages do now, but it was quite unusual at the time, and it's still one of only a few compilable languages (excepting gcj == java) that have a gc.

It's got a good documentation system. Better than javadoc. (But the presentation isn't as nice unless you purchase the ISE development platform...which I don't recommend.)

Re:what's it good for?

[auntfloyd]

and it's still one of only a few compilable languages (excepting gcj == java) that have a gc.

There is nothing special about a "compilable language" (whatever that means) using GC. Lisp has been doing it for decades (and yes, most Lisp systems are native code compilers, such as CMUCL, Allegro, CormanLisp, SBCL, etc). Oberon-2 compilers use GC, including the open source OOC and Oberon System3 from ETH. Ada was designed such that GC could be implemented, but it rarely is. Many FP languages use GC, such as Haskell. Haskell compilers, such as GHC, NHC, and HBC all use GC.

If you haven't gotten the point yet, there is nothing special about implementing languages using garbage collection, and furthermore, there was nothing innovative when Meyer decided to use it for Eiffel.

Nice language

[_Spirit]

I learned OO programming in Eiffel. It's nice and structured. Never made anything useful with it though, compiling was cumbersome (Eiffel > C > binary) and it was impossible to do any GUI stuff with the tools I had back then (95 or so).

It's just not Perl

[Shamanin]

"easy-to-read, easy-to-learn" ... and you think people who prefer perl obviscated code would really buy into something with these sorts of (negative) attributes?

Re:What is it?

[Johan Veenstra]

Then this link is for you:

http://archive.eiffel.com/eiffel/nutshell.html

Re:Who needs all these languages?

[zapfie]

Any computer program can be expressed in C... why bother with crap...

Yeah, right.. while we're going down that slope at all, any computer program can be expressed as machine code, so why bother with assembly, C, VB, or any of that? Why bother with Photoshop when you can just do stuff pixel by pixel? I think you get the point..

helloworld in Eiffel

[caternater]

For those, like me, wondering what Eiffel looked like, here is helloworld:

class HELLO_WORLD


creation
make
feature
make is
local
io:BASIC_IO
do
!!io
io.put_string("%N Hello World!!!!")
end --make
end -- class HELLO_WORLD

This was taken from http://www2.latech.edu/~acm/helloworld/eiffel.html

Also, this interesting tidbit from the comp.lang.eiffel FAQ:

QEIF: What is Eiffel?

Eiffel is an advanced object-oriented programming language that emphasizes the design and construction of high-quality and reusable software.

Eiffel is not a superset or extension of any other language. Eiffel strongly encourages OO programming and does not allow dangerous practices from previous generation languages although it does interface to other languages such as C and C++. Eiffel supports the concept of "Design by Contract" to improve software correctness.

Beyond the language aspect Eiffel may be viewed as a method of software construction. Eiffel is an excellent vehicle for software education, including for a first programming course.

(http://omicron.felk.cvut.cz/FAQ/articles/a511.htm l)

Re:helloworld in Eiffel

[eyepeepackets]

#!/usr/bin/wish;puts stdout "Hello World!"

You can now rename your example to HELLO BLOAT!

Re:What is it?

[SlowMovingTarget]

Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed to be replete with O-O-ness (no, really). For example, their are no primitives in Eiffel, everything is an object. Eiffel also has a singly-rooted hierarchy and garbage collection (like Java) and parameterized classes like C++.

Unlike Java, Eiffel syntax was designed to also act as a specification language of sorts, including syntactic support for contract specification.

Bertrand Meyer's book Object-Oriented Software Construction explains problems in modern software development, examines how object-orientation probably could solve them, then designs such a language. This language turns out to be Eiffel (sorry for the spoiler if you intend to read this > 1000 page book).

One of the points Meyer demonstrates is how a syntax to describe groups (classes) of solutions gets fleshed out into actual software that may execute. Eiffel, being that syntax, among other things, was intended to make you think in terms of types of objects sending messages to each other to get work done.

That said, I use Java. Why? Apache's Jakarta project.

Regards,

M. Murphree

Functional?

[jefu]

"functional programming paradigm" ?

Unless things have changed substantially in the last few (um) time-units-of-your-choice, Eiffel is Object Oriented, not Functional.

I've not codes much (only a few KLOC) in Eiffel, but it is a very nice language with lots of help for producing programs that run. My biggest problem with it was that it tended to be a bit on the verbose side.

Some infos about Eiffel

[DarknessInBlindingLi]

For those who are unfamilar with this language (I fear most of the /. crowd) here a basic overview of its advantages and problems:

Eiffel is a language with an minimal instruction set (sometimes refered to as RISC language), which is used mostly in environments that emphasize reliability and dependability. It's small instruction set (e.g. there is only one type of loop) make it easy to learn and understand but is taking away some of the fun of coding. Most of the work you put into an eiffel project is to find the right approache, because you don't have too many ways to implement stuff. Here in Europe it's used in mostly academic environments that like the grace of its simplistic approace and its 100% object oriented design.

Tradeoffs of this language are its high compilation time, as Eiffel source gets translated to C and then into a native form, the scarcity of available system libraries and the lack of dynamic features as shared objects and stuff.

If your going to invest some time in this language, a look at those open source projects might be worthwhile:
eposix - POSIX bindings for eiffel
gobo - a collection of tools and libraries to unify the development of applications on diffrent Eiffel compilers
mico/e - a CORBA ORB in Eiffel (DISCLAIMER: I am involved in the development of this project)

Eiffel is not a new language

[Earlybird]

• Why is everyone gung ho on creating new programming languages.

Eiffel is not a "new programming language". It's nearly twenty years old, invented in 1985 by Betrand Meyer, and a damn well-respected language at that.

Historically Eiffel has probably had more success in influencing other languages and in teaching software construction principles, than actually being used for commercial software projects, although it has seen some popularity in the finance sector. Lately, like certain other niche languages, it has seen its popularity further eroded through the emergence of Java.

Re:Huh?

[Jerf]

Real people don't depend on "teachers" to learn.

I was going to say "Real hackers don't depend on teachers to learn languages", but that's just a very isolated special case of the general principle.

If you honestly don't know anybody using something other then COBOL, Java, or a little C++, you are horribly, horribly disconnected from several exciting communities dedicated to increasing the power of the programmer. If you don't know the why multiple languages are useful, that is a grevious flaw in your education that you need to take immediate steps to rectify, and nobody's going to do it for you but you. Moreover, I don't mean to be offensive but you're so far behind you won't even understand the explanation of why you're behind; you need to be in the position of having used a couple of languages before you can understand comparisions!

Language differences are nothing like the difference between kde and gnome; it's more like the difference between GUI and CLI.

Don't wait for someone to teach you; you can't afford to while you're competing with people like me who know at least 10 languages well and can pick up a new one in a week (and I'm nothing special). I strongly suggest you rectify your ignorance.

'Course, if you don't, and you want to keep your attitude, no skin off my nose. That much less competition for me.

(*chuckle* I wish I could see you in an interview situation where someone asks about the differences between languages and you gave your post as the answer. They might not even bother to finish the interview.)

The whole point of this is you shouldn't be waiting for somebody else to look around for you, but here's some hints anyhow. I strongly suggest you spend a few months each on Perl, Python, a functional language like Haskell, and several APIs of some sort, like wxWindows or XML parsing. That's more educational then you might even think directly, since you'll get introduced to event-driven programming (though you may have seen it in Java), handling complicated data structures in general, and a lot of other useful things, not just "XML processing" and "GUI development". All of these things have great, free tutorials online.

serious limitation

[g4dget]

C, C++, Java, C#, and Objective-C, have extensive support for dynamic class/code loading and manipulating objects with types not known at compile time. These are crucial features in modern systems and applications programming languages because many modern software systems are built out of dynamically loadable components and have plug-in architectures. Support for these features is probably at the core of the success of these languages.

Java and C# are particularly interesting in this regard because they not only support dynamic class/code loading, they also support it safely and with full reflection. That's really the future.

SmartEiffel, on the other hand, takes a static, global program analysis approach to compilation and optimization. It provides almost no reflection or dynamic loading (if you compile to JVM, you may be able to rig something up). I think ultimately, that makes it a fairly unattractive choice for many applications. Even the commercial Eiffel systems only had those features retrofitted over the last few years, which probably accounts in part for the very limited success of Eiffel as a language.

SmartEiffel is a really great concept, and for some niche applications, it is very useful (I have used it for some prototyping). I would very much like to see a safe, batch-compiled language catch on for Linux system programming as an alternative to C/C++. But I just don't think SmartEiffel is it, at least not yet.

Sather

[jefu]

Eiffel is a nice language, but for me the best part of Eiffel is that it spawned Sather.

Sather started as a free subset of Eiffel but then transmuted itself into a related but very different language.

Sather had great support for procedural pre and post conditions (not the aftermarket cheezy afterthought kind of thing that some languages seem to want to adopt), class invariants that could be automatically checked on call and return of a "public" method, class based iterators (not cursor classes, but built into the class itself), constrained genericity, simple (and relatively restricted) overloading ("a + b" became a.plus(b)), unboxed objects and so on....

Without formally measuring it, I'd guess that writing three more or less equivalent programs in Java, C++ and Sather would result in Sather having the lowest LOC count and the fastest development time. Though the tradeoffs were sometimes odd, good pre/post conditions saved me huge amounts of debugging and testing time, but required quite a bit more up front thought on what those conditions were - this resulted in much better code, but sometimes required interesting amounts of redesign.

Sadly, Sather, while still available here is GNU Sather is no longer being developed or supported AFAIK. Were I more of a compiler maven I'd work on it, but I doubt my efforts as a compiler writer would improve things much.

Eiffel versus Java

[hazzzard]

I've used Eiffel quite a bit;
actually, I was a TA in a class that used Eiffel.
Being an experienced Java programmer also,
I would say that:

• Eiffel's syntax is a matter of taste. However, no matter what taste it is very clean and easy to learn, but sometimes trades this beauty for inefficiencies that ruin your daily life. For example, the semicolons between statements are completely optional, so you can write a:=1; b:=2 or a:=1 b:=2. This does not make the language ambiguous, but it means that you can only catch very few syntax errors at a time (usually, parsers can skip erroneous statements and report syntax errors even after them). The compiler we used to work with (ISE's Eiffel Bench) actually reported only one error at a time which was at some random place in the code. Just imagine the experience of writing a bigger piece and then trying to compile it.
• What I liked about the language is its consistency, especially in the library. The standard library is a textbook grade collection of container classes and there are standards for naming things. For example, to retrieve something you will always use the function 'item' and not like in Java get, getItem getElementAt and so on. This is at least useful if you don't have an IDE that shows all the possible functions while you are typing.
• Eiffel has full generics. This even includes bounded genericity, so you can do things like a sorted list of some sort where the sort has to be a subclass of Comparable. This rocks, especially when you compare it to the weak generics that Java is going to have.
• Full multiple inheritance, even with renaming functions. A matter of taste but it can be useful.
• Some features of Eiffel are debatable, one of which is covariance for parameters: This means that if you override a method in a subclass, you may make its parameters more specific. This means that you can get dynamic type errors even though the system is mostly statically checked. Also, you can throw out a function when you are inheriting, which also may lead to dynamic type errors. In practice, this won't hurt you (and can even be useful), but hardcore type system people can become upset about it.
• Overall, Eiffel is a great language for philosophers. In practice, Java is more convenient and even though it's not as consistent and pure it has a more useful library (I don't mean the collections but the other things it comes with). Another aspect is that Sun's Java licensing is nicer than ISE's (Bertrand Meyer's Company). Be careful with them, they are cooperating with the evildoers and integrating Eiffel into .NET.
• Even though some language features are debatable, there is a great book available that I would even recommend to non-Eiffel folks: Bertrand Meyers OOSC.

Re:Not another one!

[CFN]

Hey, I really cannot understand your animosity towards the development of new languages. At the very worst, you can are free to bury your head in the sand, ignore their existance, and go on with your life. At the best, this might be the perfect tool for you to do your programming with.

Now, there are very good reasons why a programmer, even someone who will never in their career look at something other than C, benefits from this work.

Computer Science is a continually evolving field (thats why universites have CS departments, filled with people doing research in CS). Because some computer scientists study programming languages, programming languages are evolving as well. This means that researchers keep introducing new and different features into new languages.

Of course, the vast majority of these new languages never become popular (or ever get used for even a single real program), but this collection of ideas influences more "mainstream" language. Things like classes, type-safety, generics, etc., all began as research ideas and then migrated into production systems. (Of course, Eiffel is well beyond the research language phase).

So even if you never adopt a cutting edge language, eventually, a tool you use will exist, or have been made better, because of that language.

Point is, instead of bitching you should be appreciative.

open source gui/database project for SE ..

[elj]

The ELJ project - http://elj.sourceforge.net/ has been successful in providing much needed multiplatform libraries to SmallEiffel/SmartEiffel developers.

The wxEiffel GUI library provides a comprehensive interface to the wxWindows GUI. Database interfaces to Firebird, sqlite, berkeley db, mysql, postgres.

There are even libraries for Regular Expressions and for those who like the perl way of doing things - see Perlish.

The 0.5 release announcement in comp.os.linux.announce gives more details. The ELJ project is undertaking the necessary work to move from SmallEiffel to SmartEiffel.

There are many other open source Eiffel projects:

• GOBO - lex, yacc, xml, data structures, date/time libraries and
• eposix which aims to provide a a 100% complete Eiffel binding to Standard C and POSIX.

Eiffel has come a long way over the years. Misconceptions still abound. You can now develop multiplatform applications using open source Eiffel tools and libraries. There are small hurdles to jump as there are with anything. Give it a try and become involved if there is something about Eiffel which you find appealing.

Some generally unknown facts about Eiffel

[name_already_in_use]

Eiffel has been around for about 17 years, so a lot of people who used it a long time ago and haven't used it since moan about old problems with the language THAT SIMPLY DON'T APPLY MORE. Here is an up to date list of cool things about Eiffel:

- Compilation is not so slow anymore.

- It a full .NET language. Eiffel Software have made a Visual Studio plug-in, and EiffelStudio (previously EiffelBench, or EBench) can also be used to make .NET or non-.NET applications.

- EiffelStudio is the IDE for creating Eiffel applications was COMPLETELY REWRITTEN a couple of years ago, so previous uses of EiffelBench won't recognise it anymore. The new studio is better in every respect and has the best class browsing facilities you will find in any IDE ANYWHERE (I'm not kidding).

- EiffelStudio was written using Eiffel Software's Vision2 library - a 100% platform independent library meaning it is identical on Windows and *nix platforms. You can use Vision2 to make your own cross-platform interfaces with real ease.

- The .NET implementation of Eiffel adds some programming mechanisms that are NOT available in Java, C#, C++. Namely these are multiple inheritance of classes, genericity (true generics), design by contract (pre- and post- conditions/assertation to improve software reliabilty and greatly ease the debugging process).

- Eiffel Software provide a FREE version of EiffelStudio and Envision! (the .NET plug-in) from there web site.

There's loads more to this language, but aint got time to talk about it, so just check it out yourself.

Use TinyCC with SmartEiffel!

[Per Wigren]

If you're going to code in SmartEiffel, you should try using TinyCC instead of GCC while developing! TinyCC is an extremly fast and memoryefficient ANSI-C compiler that is 100% compatible with SmartEiffel! TCC generates code which is about as fast as "gcc -O2", but compiles almost 1000 times faster than "gcc -O2"!! I know these figures look unbelievable, but they are authentic! Just try it yourself if you don't believe it!

oggy gexace # time gcc -O2 -o gexace-gcc gexace.c
real 10m12.746s
user 9m33.227s
sys 0m4.897s
oggy gexace # time tcc -o gexace-tcc gexace.c
real 0m1.353s
user 0m0.472s
sys 0m0.061s
oggy gexace # ls -l gexace-*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1216938 Nov 29 18:27 gexace-gcc
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 994200 Nov 29 18:27 gexace-tcc

The gexace.c examplefile is from GOBO, generated by SmartEiffel and is about 2MB...
When your program is ready to be distributed you can compile it using "gcc -O3 -mcpu=i686 -fomit-frame-pointer -ffast-math" or similar to make it run ~10% faster, but compilation may take hours instead of seconds...

Re:absolutely nothin'

[jejones]

You forgot the "HUH...Good God, y'all!"

Programming Environment for Eiffel

[willamowius]

For a nice IDE for Eiffel you should get the Eiffel extension for the SNiFF+ environment

http://www.willamowius.de/eiffel.html

There are free versions of SNiFF+ for projects up to 200 (?) classes which should be ok for starters.