Dictionary.net

French engineer who constructed the Eiffel Tower (1832-1923)

French engineer who constructed the Eiffel Tower (1832-1923)

An object-oriented language produced by BertrandMeyer in 1985. Eiffel has classes with multipleinheritance and repeated inheritance, deferred classes(like Smalltalk's abstract class), and clusters ofclasses. Objects can have both static types and dynamictypes. The dynamic type must be a descendant of the static(declared) type. Dynamic binding resolves multipleinheritance clashes. It has flattened forms of classes, inwhich all of the inherited features are added at the samelevel and generic classes parametrised by type.Other features are persistent objects, garbage collection,exception handling, foreign language interface. Classesmay be equipped with assertions (routine preconditions andpostconditions, class invariants) implementing the theory of"Design by Contract" and helping produce more reliablesoftware.Eiffel is compiled to C. It comes with libraries containingseveral hundred classes: data structures and algorithms(EiffelBase), graphics and user interfaces (EiffelVision) andlanguage analysis (EiffelLex, EiffelParse).The first release of Eiffel was release 1.4, introduced at thefirst OOPSLA in October 1986. The language proper was firstdescribed in a University of California, Santa Barbara reportdated September 1985.Eiffel is available, with different libraries, from severalsources including Interactive Software Engineering, USA (ISEEiffel version 3.3); Sig Computer GmbH, Germany (Eiffel/S);and Tower, Inc., Austin (Tower Eiffel).The language definition is administered by an openorganisation, the Nonprofit International Consortium forEiffel (NICE). There is a standard kernel library.An Eiffel source checker and compiler front-end isavailable.Latest version: 4.2, as of 1998-10-28.Latest version: ISE Eiffel version 3.3.See also Sather, Distributed Eiffel, Lace, shelf.E-mail: .["Eiffel: The Language", Bertrand Meyer, P-H 1992].