Eiffel

ruby-talk
1

What do you guys think of the Eiffel language? I use Ruby for all my
personal projects, but when it comes to building huge (multi-million
line) systems, I look to the safety of statically-typed languages. I've
grown very tired of the deficiencies in C++ and am now hunting out a
better language to build highly-reliable code. I suppose Java would be
okay but everything about that platform seems boring and bloated.
Eiffel looks very impressive and seems to have many of the same language
abilities as Ruby. Not to mention, Design by Contract looks pretty
useful. Has anyone used Eiffel? Success stories? Crash & Burn
stories? It doesn't look like the language has changed much in the last
6 years. Is that because the language is about dead or because it is
that stable?

-Greg

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2

"Fitzgerald,Greg" <GFITZGERALD@CERNER.COM> writes:

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What do you guys think of the Eiffel language? I use Ruby for all my
personal projects, but when it comes to building huge (multi-million
line) systems, I look to the safety of statically-typed languages.

I would appriciate not to start a discussin about that again. One does
not need those languages even for large systems.... It might help
sometimes it might hinder to other times.

I've
grown very tired of the deficiencies in C++ and am now hunting out a
better language to build highly-reliable code. I suppose Java would be
okay but everything about that platform seems boring and bloated.
Eiffel looks very impressive and seems to have many of the same language
abilities as Ruby. Not to mention, Design by Contract looks pretty
useful. Has anyone used Eiffel?

Yes now for around 12 years. It's the language I know best.
We even have dared to write a descendant to Eiffel called Q, it has
reached alpha status. We used Eiffel to develop that
language...

Success stories?

AFAIK is it used relativly widley in the banking sector (London
IIRC).

Crash & Burn
stories?

It doesn't look like the language has changed much in the last
6 years.

Oh, it has changed. Some syntactical elements have changed forth and
back but the core is still the same. Relativly new is the concept of
agents what you can see as kind-of-blocks. That was very much missed,
at least for me, and I have posted this opinion more than once ...

Is that because the language is about dead or because it is
that stable?

The language is alive. You get all kind of tools for
Eiffel-development but at least the "serious" offers have a hefty price
tag (that's all what comes from ISE), but you can get SmartEiffel
which is free...

However you might like to hear that an Eiffel.NET is
available.....

If you ever should consider starting an Eifel project, feel free to
contact me :wink:

However you might get better answers in comp.lang.eiffel.

Ruby has "borrowed" quite a bit from Eiffel... so if you like and know
Ruby it is not terrible hard to start with Eiffel....

Regards
Friedrich

···

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3

Hello Fitzgerald,Greg,

What do you guys think of the Eiffel language? I use Ruby for all my
personal projects, but when it comes to building huge (multi-million
line) systems, I look to the safety of statically-typed languages. I've
grown very tired of the deficiencies in C++ and am now hunting out a
better language to build highly-reliable code. I suppose Java would be
okay but everything about that platform seems boring and bloated.
Eiffel looks very impressive and seems to have many of the same language
abilities as Ruby. Not to mention, Design by Contract looks pretty
useful. Has anyone used Eiffel? Success stories? Crash & Burn
stories? It doesn't look like the language has changed much in the last
6 years. Is that because the language is about dead or because it is
that stable?

Arachno Ruby is a SmartEiffel program with about 200K LOC. With this i
reached the limits of what could be pratical for compilation (it
currently compiles eiffel into 135 files with 1098303 LOC). I think
ISE can handle programs in a range upto 1 MLOC and it is pretty
expensive but with 1MLOC i guess that 10000 Euro are not so much money
anymore.

Desin by Contract is nice. But you can simulate that with asserts.
Using invariants is a "No Go" option because even current systems are
a magnitude to slow to use them. Sure you could turn them off for
specific classes but i guess that nobody who's telling you to do so
have ever had to manage a huge ACE file and a lot of small test
programs. DbC is much more a development philosophy then a technical
implementation. The only good is that if your program crashs the
chance is (in my case) 80% that i can fix the problem immediately
because the crash is very near the error location and the stacktrace
you get from SmartEiffel is extremely usefull. But on the other hand
even very minor errors crashs the application and leaves a bad
impression in your customers minds.

The must important thing in my opinion is the static typing and the
enforcement of a consistent programming style, well there aren't so
many different ways to write code in Eiffel. This makes even larger
refactoring much easier.

The new eiffel version 3 (ETL-3) has changed a lot of things. Not huge
things but as useful as an upgrade from Java 1.2 to Java 1.4

The real problems i found were that SmartEiffel don't support threads
(theres a patched version for this) and it does not support DLL's. The
last one may be a problem depending on your problem domain.

Would i go again with Eiffel: I must say that i don't know.
I only know that i will never go back to do and some java coding if i
can avoid this.

···

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Best regards, emailto: scholz at scriptolutions dot com
Lothar Scholz http://www.ruby-ide.com
CTO Scriptolutions Ruby, PHP, Python IDE 's

4

Have you tried Ada 95?

They are even creating ada2005 which is comming out
soon. I use it in certain projects. I was orginally
developed for US Department of Defense. Its a very
secure language. Ada improves reliability cuts down on
maintaince costs. It has great runtime checking. You
can compile programs. There are ada jobs out there :).

The "Why ada?" section
http://www.adaic.org/whyada/index.html

Ada Authority - free ref manuals etc

Ada resource assoc.
http://www.adaic.org/

Ada user homepage

Linux ada Intro
http://www.pegasoft.ca/homes/book.html

Free ada books
http://burks.brighton.ac.uk/burks/language/ada/

--David Ross

···

What do you guys think of the Eiffel language? I
use Ruby for all my
personal projects, but when it comes to building
huge (multi-million
line) systems, I look to the safety of
statically-typed languages. I've
grown very tired of the deficiencies in C++ and am
now hunting out a
better language to build highly-reliable code. I
suppose Java would be
okay but everything about that platform seems boring
and bloated.
Eiffel looks very impressive and seems to have many
of the same language
abilities as Ruby. Not to mention, Design by
Contract looks pretty
useful. Has anyone used Eiffel? Success stories?
Crash & Burn
stories? It doesn't look like the language has
changed much in the last
6 years. Is that because the language is about dead
or because it is
that stable?

-Greg

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE

This message and any included attachments
are from Cerner Corporation and are intended
only for the addressee. The information
contained in this message is confidential and
may constitute inside or non-public information
under international, federal, or state
securities laws. Unauthorized forwarding,
printing, copying, distribution, or use of such
information is strictly prohibited and may be
unlawful. If you are not the addressee, please
promptly delete this message and notify the
sender of the delivery error by e-mail or you
may call Cerner's corporate offices in Kansas
City, Missouri, U.S.A at (+1) (816)221-1024.
---------------------------------------- --

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5

Lothar Scholz <mailinglists@scriptolutions.com> writes:

Arachno Ruby is a SmartEiffel program with about 200K LOC. With this i
reached the limits of what could be pratical for compilation (it
currently compiles eiffel into 135 files with 1098303 LOC). I think
ISE can handle programs in a range upto 1 MLOC and it is pretty
expensive but with 1MLOC i guess that 10000 Euro are not so much money
anymore.

Well you have driven SmartEiffel to it's limits. That is one Eiffel
implementation. So I'm not sure what had happened if you had used
ISE-Eiffel or maybe Visual Eiffel.

However what definitly should be said. I never would have started
using SmartEiffel for that kind of job. That you managed it just show
IMHO how far one can get while using DBC extensivly.

Just for those not knowing SmartEiffel. Smarteiffel is a Commmand
Line interface compiler, with just a few tools. What you would call a decent
IDE is not available. Debugging is a mess, Browsing is as hard as can be
etc.

Well I probably should stop posing about Eiffel here....

Regards
Friedrich

···

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