At our school they developed a tool that would show a 100% match score when comparing an original and a derivative created as you suggested.
The tool would only match structure not presentation. It parses the source code and compares the ast, but only after throwing away lots of stuff (identifiers,...) and then sorting it in a certain way (so reshuffling functions won't help either).
Only until some of the ad-blockers actually request and download the ads, but don't view them! Unless there is some DRM thingy installed on your computer, whith which such an "evil" webbrowser could be detected, google would have no chance to find out you are not really viewing their ads.
One thing the article does not mention is that there is even an Eiffel Wrapper Generator. A tool which autmates much of the task when writing Eiffel bindings for C libraries.
If Eiffel were indeed to be used for a project such as Gnome, such a tool could greatly reduce the amount of work needed to access all of the existing Gnome libraries, which are AFAIK all in written in C.
EWG even comes with GTK 2.x bindings contained as an example.
PS: The above is a shameless plug, I am the main developer of EWG (;
One thing the article does not mention is that there is even an Eiffel Wrapper Generator. A tool which autmates much of the task when writing Eiffel bindings for C libraries.
If Eiffel were indeed to be used for a project such as Gnome, such a tool could greatly reduce the amount of work needed to access all of the existing Gnome libraries, which are AFAIK all in written in C.
EWG even comes with GTK 2.x bindings contained as an example.
PS: The above is a shameless plug, I am the main developer of EWG (;
Your point that _just_ another layer of abstraction doesn't introduce anything worthwhile has been answered by other people. (Dude, why don't you program in assembly, or brainfuck, or whatever?:)
For what it's worth, please make a distinction between C++ and C, they are two very different beasts. Two of the most common Eiffel compilers ISE Eiffel and SmartEiffel do compile to C code, not to C++ code. You probably refered to one of those when making your claim that Eiffel compilers generate C++ code (which is a false statement). Also please note that conceptually an Eiffel compiler can generate assembly code as well. In fact VIsual Eiffel does it. And ISE Eiffel does compile to Microsofts.Net byte code as well.
I will get bashed for this but MS actually does some interesting things which could improve reliability and stability of their OSes.
Check out the SLAM toolkit. It is far from complete and others are
doing related work, but still MS is clearly researching some very interesting ideas here.
Basically (and a bit oversimplified) what they try to do is create software that can reasonably well check if a given device driver could ever deadlock. If you can tell that before even compiling the driver, I'd say thats pretty innovative (;
More than bandwidth, what I need would be a bus that doesn't have a problem with too many extensions because of a limited number of IRQs.
Today most mainboard come with many onboard PCI componentes. If you really are going to put in 3-5 extra PCI components in a stock PC, you usually end up in a nice game of 'let's see what order works best', or cannot use all cards together at all.
True, but one cannot deny the fact that SCO does act very weird. Usually when some company "steals" GPL code, the copyright holder gives the company a chance to correct his mistake (and shows proove immediatly).
SCO does not do all this, which does not make it look honest.
Assuming I understand what you want to say, i.e. you did not find a way to browses the classes of a library you used, I think thats weird.
Because Eiffel has put emphasis on documentation _in_ the source code long before there was JavaDoc (for example). The language reference book (ETL) even defines certain views that help you understand how to use a class (flat, short, flat/short etc).
And all Eiffel compilers I know support those tools. Even the non graphical SmartEiffel comes with command line tools to search a given system.
What libraries/compiler did you use to get such a bad experience?
For those who would like to know more about Eiffel from people who use it or just have a nice chat, drop by at #eiffel on irc.debian.org. (I think irc.freenode.org works as well)
Well, not exactly. Eiffel# offers some features that C# does not - and those are reason enough to use it. You get true genericity, not only that fake array genericty. And you get Design by Contract.
And if you follow ISE's announcements, you will find out that they are working hard to get more and more of Eiffel into Eiffel #.
In the light of that C# only looks like a crippled Eiffel# to me (;
This is new to me. Can you back your point with a URL or some reasoning. AFAIK the JVM does not allow MI just like the CLR. The reason behind that is that dynamic class loading and MI are very hard to combine (results in a efficency loss).
Of course I may miss something here - and I would be glad to hear otherwise...
thanks, that helped. it looks like I saw things too complicated. next thing i did was exit x, cause I though that might be neccessary too, actually the opposite was true (; but unfortunatly the installer keeps crashing on me, so i better wait for some bugfixes...
I am keen to install helix-gnome on my RH 6.1 intel box here, but I would feel saver if I would knew beforehand wether I need to deinstall the standard RedHat Gnome RPMs or not? After a look at rpmfind it looks like the RPMs are named differently than the RedHat ones (the Helix ones all end with -hexlix-*). So I guess I probably need to deinstall everything first, right?
What do you think about concurency in general and the "one keyword approach" SCOOP proposal as described in Object Oriented Software Construction 2 (Bertand Meyer, Prentice Hall)?
When I read your comment I remember a sig I see regulary on usenet: "Those who do not know Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly". I guess that holds up for Eiffel too.
I think I remember a quote from Bjarne (probably from http://www.elj.com) that said s.th. like: "I prefere to have as less to do with Bertrand Meyer as possible". But please take that with a grain of salt, since my memory may fool me. Still it would be interesting to hear a brief description of what Bjarne thinks about Eiffel and Bertrand. I simply cannot believe that someone who has invested so much time in developing a computer language and is doubtless a very capable mind, does not value Design By Contract (TM) (;
Slashdot Mirror
At our school they developed a tool that would show a 100% match score when comparing an original and a derivative created as you suggested.
...) and then sorting it in a certain way (so reshuffling functions won't help either).
The tool would only match structure not presentation. It parses the source code and compares the ast, but only after throwing away lots of stuff (identifiers,
I believe the kicker bar is a gdesklet applet. You can find it here
Only until some of the ad-blockers actually request and download the ads, but don't view them! Unless there is some DRM thingy installed on your computer, whith which such an "evil" webbrowser could be detected, google would have no chance to find out you are not really viewing their ads.
If Eiffel were indeed to be used for a project such as Gnome, such a tool could greatly reduce the amount of work needed to access all of the existing Gnome libraries, which are AFAIK all in written in C.
EWG even comes with GTK 2.x bindings contained as an example.
PS: The above is a shameless plug, I am the main developer of EWG (;
If Eiffel were indeed to be used for a project such as Gnome, such a tool could greatly reduce the amount of work needed to access all of the existing Gnome libraries, which are AFAIK all in written in C.
EWG even comes with GTK 2.x bindings contained as an example.
PS: The above is a shameless plug, I am the main developer of EWG (;
For what it's worth, please make a distinction between C++ and C, they are two very different beasts. Two of the most common Eiffel compilers ISE Eiffel and SmartEiffel do compile to C code, not to C++ code. You probably refered to one of those when making your claim that Eiffel compilers generate C++ code (which is a false statement). Also please note that conceptually an Eiffel compiler can generate assembly code as well. In fact VIsual Eiffel does it. And ISE Eiffel does compile to Microsofts .Net byte code as well.
Check out the SLAM toolkit. It is far from complete and others are doing related work, but still MS is clearly researching some very interesting ideas here.
Basically (and a bit oversimplified) what they try to do is create software that can reasonably well check if a given device driver could ever deadlock. If you can tell that before even compiling the driver, I'd say thats pretty innovative (;
More than bandwidth, what I need would be a bus
that doesn't have a problem with too many extensions
because of a limited number of IRQs.
Today most mainboard come with many onboard PCI componentes. If you really are going to put in 3-5 extra PCI components in a stock PC, you usually end up in a nice game of 'let's see what order works best', or cannot use all cards together at all.
Looking back at the original question, "Has anybody considered that maybe SCO are telling the truth":
If SCO does not seem to be honest, a point you supported, why would I believe them?
Ad "capitalism" others have already replied to this point.
True, but one cannot deny the fact that SCO does act very weird. Usually when some company "steals" GPL code, the copyright holder gives the company a chance to correct his mistake (and shows proove immediatly).
SCO does not do all this, which does not make it look honest.
Assuming I understand what you want to say, i.e. you did not find a way to browses the classes of a library you used, I think thats weird.
Because Eiffel has put emphasis on documentation _in_ the source code long before there was JavaDoc (for example). The language reference book (ETL) even defines certain views that help you understand how to use a class (flat, short, flat/short etc).
And all Eiffel compilers I know support those tools. Even the non graphical SmartEiffel comes with command line tools to search a given system.
What libraries/compiler did you use to get such a bad experience?
For those who would like to know more about Eiffel from people who use it or just have a nice chat, drop by at #eiffel on irc.debian.org. (I think irc.freenode.org works as well)
Eiffel is a very powerful OO language. There are tons of links about Eiffel at: http://www.cetus-links.org/oo_eiffel.html. Check them out!
And if you follow ISE's announcements, you will find out that they are working hard to get more and more of Eiffel into Eiffel #.
In the light of that C# only looks like a crippled Eiffel# to me (;
This is new to me. Can you back your point with a URL or some reasoning. AFAIK the JVM does not allow MI just like the CLR. The reason behind that is that dynamic class loading and MI are very hard to combine (results in a efficency loss).
Of course I may miss something here - and I would be glad to hear otherwise...
thanks, that helped. it looks like I saw things too complicated. next thing i did was exit x, cause I though that might be neccessary too, actually the opposite was true (; but unfortunatly the installer keeps crashing on me, so i better wait for some bugfixes...
I am keen to install helix-gnome on my RH 6.1 intel box here, but I would feel saver if I would knew beforehand wether I need to deinstall the standard RedHat Gnome RPMs or not? After a look at rpmfind it looks like the RPMs are named differently than the RedHat ones (the Helix ones all end with -hexlix-*). So I guess I probably need to deinstall everything first, right?
What do you think about concurency in general and the "one keyword approach" SCOOP proposal as described in Object Oriented Software Construction 2 (Bertand Meyer, Prentice Hall)?
When I read your comment I remember a sig I see regulary on usenet: "Those who do not know Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly". I guess that holds up for Eiffel too.
I think I remember a quote from Bjarne (probably from http://www.elj.com) that said s.th. like: "I prefere to have as less to do with Bertrand Meyer as possible". But please take that with a grain of salt, since my memory may fool me. Still it would be interesting to hear a brief description of what Bjarne thinks about Eiffel and Bertrand. I simply cannot believe that someone who has invested so much time in developing a computer language and is doubtless a very capable mind, does not value Design By Contract (TM) (;