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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!"
Priced at US$ 4,799.00, that IS a bit dear.
Instead of seeing a NON-free version of Eiffel, I would like to se a free version.
There already is a free compiler for Eiffel, you can download it here.
Note to self: get smarter troll to guard door.
Classification of computer languages into "Mainstream" or "not Mainstream" is subjective.
Not only that, it's mainly down to the attitudes of the language users, not the wider community.
Eiffel is always billed as "this far-out groovy different and better type thing" by its own users.
Fortran is clearly a mainstream computer language, if you're a mechanical engineer. But engineers regard it as one more tool. They don't care if it's mainstream or not, it's what they've always used, what they are trained in, and what they have to continue with to use their numerical codes that have been continuously refined for decades now.
COBOL is clearly a mainstream computer language, if you're a financial services provider. They don't care if it's mainstream or not, it's what they've always used, and what they have to continue using unless they want to bear the hideous cost of ripping out their 99.999%+ availability systems that have been performing adequately and continuously refined... yadda yadda
VB is clearly a mainstream computer language, if you're sitting in the mid-size company or SOHO space. It seems to matter to VB-weenies and Microsoft that they are considered "the mainstream". By repeating this often enough, they kinda make it true. Propaganda 101.
Lisp is clearly a mainstream computer language (ANSI-standardised even!), if you're an actual computer scientist as opposed to J. Random Developer. But Lispers' attitude is more like "Mainstream? Who wants that? We are better than that! We have been here since the dawn of time, never growing old! You mere mortals cannot comprehend the heraclitean fire that is the eternal truth of the infinite mutability of Lisp, the language of languages! Mwahahhahaha".
DBC-style assertions are also checked when the original method that asserted it is not run, but one that overrides it. For example, when you have a class A with a method doSomething that promises always to return an integer between 1 and 10, and a class B derived from A that overrides doSomething, you can be sure that you still get an integer between 1 and 10, while in C++, the assert()s would not run.
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
yes, but that type can be polymorphic. So while not parametric polymorphism (what we normally call gerneric), or 2nd order $\Lambda$ calc (erm. Is this equivalent to system-F? I can never recall), they can be applied to arguments of differening type.
Hence they deserveto be called generic.
Just two comments on your otherwise good post:
* I don't see the syntactic overhead comment. It seems pretty reasonable to me.
* It's better than Java on the OO front. Much cleaner, without the C/C++ baggage.