EiffelStudio 5.3 for Linux

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!"

Comments

Re:DBC using assert()

[__past__]

There is a DBC implementation for CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System. It doesn't require a preprocessor, of course, Lisp is flexible enough to do such a thing portably.

Re:DBC using assert()

[LeonardShelby]

To start with, DBC in Eiffel is at the interface level. Asserts in C/C++/Java are part of the code, and are not visible when you extract just the interface. They are in Eiffel.

Second, DBC in Eiffel integrates with inheritance. Contracts are inherited along with their routines, and there are rules for how they can be modified.

Also, when contracting is turned on in Eiffel, the calls only go one level deep. That is, when a routine is called, it's contract is tested. If the contract contains a routine call, that routine will get executed, but the contract on that next routine will not. Saves time and eliminates potential infinite recursion. Not the same with asserts in C/C++, which will get executed until no more are available to call.

Finally, DBC does connect with exceptions. When they are turned on, and one fails, an exception is thrown and the IDE will kick in the debugger on that point. The DBC paradigm lets you determine whose fault it was (caller or callee), and lets debugging go much smoother. When DBC is off, no exception will be thrown, and behavior is technically undefined. There was discussion on the ISE Users Group on Yahoo recently about how exceptions and contracts relate, mainly from a Java/JML point of view.

~Steve