Eiffel: An Overview

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2 points·fuzztester··6 comments

I know Eiffel is not very popular, but it's quite an interesting language. I had tried out EiffelStudio some years ago; the trial edition. I didn't write much code in it; I mainly just built and ran some of the example programs.

I had used assertions a fair amount in C projects years ago, so the DbC feature of Eiffel is what initially got me interested in it.

But it has many other good language features, IMO.

I had also read a good chunk of the Object-Oriented Software construction book by Bertrand Meyer, creator of Eiffel, again some years ago.

That book was quite good too (and quite thick) and, IIRC, it is still available as a free download on the net.

> But it has many other good language features, IMO.

It also has a few rather problematic corners, e.g. that preconditions in multithreaded applications interfere with thread synchronization.

Interesting, I did not know this. I wonder why that happens. I would have thought, not having looked into how preconditions are implemented in Eiffel, that it might work the same as in C, that is like C's assert, in which case I don't know why there should be multi-threading issues with Eiffel preconditions.

It's a conceptual and implementation issue; the conditions must also be met in a multithreaded environment, which means they have a synchronization effect (and corresponding thread synchronication code must be added by the compiler); this synchronisation must be considered when doing multithreaded design, and this can become pretty complex.

thanks, I think I get it roughly now.

(2012)

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