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Eiffel

If you are both curious about Eiffel and in a hurry, take a couple of minutes to read
these facts about Eiffel. If anything here seems too good to be true, please
suspend your disbelief. Press on to the more detailed documentation for the
rationale, and our success stories for the evidence behind these facts.

Eiffel is the most comprehensive approach to the

construction of successful object-oriented
software.
Software produced with Eiffel is typically:

 Cheaper -- You spend less on development, debugging, maintenance

 Better -- You get the bugs before they get you
 Shorter time-to-market -- You release quality products ahead of your
competitors
 Easier -- In every way: understanding, maintenance, reuse, and extension

Systems developed using Eiffel can be made

portable across major industry platforms.
 Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista including CLS compliance on Microsoft .NET
 Major Unix versions
 Macintosh OS X
 Linux
 OpenVMS

Eiffel is the only approach that covers analysis,

design, implementation and maintenance in a
single framework.
Eiffel consists of:

The Eiffel Method

 Is Based on a small number of powerful ideas from computer science and

software engineering
o An example of these is Design by Contract
 Defines a software system as a set of components interacting
through precisely specified contracts
  Contracts are active and enforceable throughout the life-cycle
 Design by Contract promotes:
 Precise software specification
 Software reliability
 Safe, effective software reuse
 Uses a "single-product" model
o All life-cycle phases are supported by a single notation
 No need to switch, say, from "analysis language" to "design
language"
o Products of all phases are recorded in a single document with
multiple views

The Eiffel Programming Language

 Exists to express the products of the Eiffel Method

 Supports features not always available in competing technologies
o Contracts and contract monitoring
o Exception handling based on software specification (versus ad hoc
try/catch)
o Void-safety: calls on void (null) references are eliminated at compile
time
o Inheritance
 Includes multiple and repeated inheritance
 Safe and fully controllable
o Genericity (generic classes), including constrained genericity
o Platform independent concurrency (SCOOP)
 Widely recognized as simultaneously the simplest and most complete
implementation of object-oriented concepts
 Is clean, elegant, readable, easy to learn

EiffelStudio and the Eiffel Libraries

 EiffelStudio
o Runs on all major platforms (of course, it's built with Eiffel)
o Features lightning-fast compilation (Melting Ice Technology)
o Generates lightning-fast executables
 Final compilation generates standard C (MSIL in the case
of .NET)
 Speed of executables rivals native C
o Provides multiple views of your product
 Views for different life-cycle phases and developer roles
 Graphical views
o Features automated generation of HTML and XML documentation

 The Eiffel Libraries

o Contain rich, time-tested, multi-platform components
 o Include facilities for
 GUI building and graphics
 Web
 Networking
 Fundamental algorithms and data structures
 Object persistence and database access
 Multi-threading
 Lexical analysis and parsing
 Interfacing with other technologies

Eiffel has a proven track record of successful

projects
 Some of the largest successful object-oriented projects ever built, including
systems target to:
o Finance and securities
o Education
o Trading
o Manufacturing
o Telecommunications
o Government and national defense
o Science

For a more detailed overview see An Invitation to Eiffel .