ISE Eiffel

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An Eiffel development environment originally introduced in 1986 by Bertrand Meyer and his company Interactive Software Engineering (ISE). The system compiles to C code so you will have to have a reasonably modern C compiler for it to work. In its day Tower Eiffel running on OS/2 was such a large portion of the Eiffel user base that ISE ported their system to the operating system in 1998 after Tower stopped selling their system even though IBM had already announced they were dropping OS/2 altogether, the OS/2 version was withdrawn from the market a few years later.

The system has more recently been renamed Eiffel Studio

Personal Eiffel

The company did also for a time sell a cut down version for Microsoft Windows 3.x called Personal Eiffel in the mid 90s and it works well enough in an WinOS/2 session, however it was extremely rudimentary even when first introduced and for all intents and purposes a severely crippled version of the full system and it is difficult to imagine a reason for using it in this day and age.

Versions

  • 1 (1986)
  • 2 (1988)
  • 2.3 (1989)
  • 3 (1990)
  • 4.1 (1996)
  • 4.2 (1998)
  • 4.3 (1999) : First version with OS/2 support (although a beta 4.2 existed as well)
  • 4.5 (2000)
Personal Eiffel
  • 1994 PE Version 1

Licence

The product was originally only available as a commercial offering although it shipped with source code, but since 2006 the company has offered the environment dual licensed, this was in response to the open sourcing of Visual Eiffel a few months earlier and had the desired effect of killing all interest in that project:

  • Users that donate their code to the Eiffel open source project or release their software under an approved open source license can use the product as if it was released under the GPL v2, although portions of the package are under the more liberal Eiffel Forum License v2.
  • Users that want to release commercial product will have to buy a commercial licence from Eiffel Software.

Author & publisher

Links

Publications