Eiffel

Object-oriented structured programming language in the Algol family, originally designed by Bertrand Meyer and partially inspired by Simula and Modula-2. Much like Smalltalk, Eiffel has also suffered in the last few years due to companies that built commercial tools for the language have turned their attention to Java. The language has a reputation as the language you turn to when other languages and tools have failed, particularly with large programming projects, although this has been downplayed a little as more tools for "programming in the large" appear for more mainstream languages. However the clean object-orientation features of Eiffel really have no like in other languages even with other O-O languages such as Smalltalk and Java, this means that creating code that is easy to re-factor or change outright makes it a really coherent tool for prototyping and for software that needs to be adjusted frequently such as market trading software.

Eiffel was forked into another programming language called Sather fairly early on in its lifetime.

OS/2 implementations

• Eiffel/S (SIG Computer GmbH, Germany)
• ISE Eiffel
• SmallEiffel - Open Source - renamed to SmartEiffel
• Tower Eiffel

Classes and bindings

• Tower Eiffel Booch Classes - Freeware release of the old Booch classes that Tower used to sell, work with v2 of Tower Eiffel.
• A version of the O2 System Object oriented database was available with Eiffel bindings for a while.

Eiffel related programmer's utilities

• Exuberant ctags - Creates index files out of Eiffel source files

DOS implementations

• Eon/Eiffel - Shareware
• SmallEiffel - Open Source

Editor support

• Boxer - Eiffel syntax support included by default - Commercial

Win-OS/2 implementations

• ISE Eiffel - Commercial

Java implementations

• J-Eiffel - Eiffel to Java compiler - Open source

Publications

• Bertrand Meyer: Object Oriented Software Construction - Prentice-Hall 1988, ISBN 0-13-629155-4

The book where Eiffel was first described, but is actually a textbook of object-oriented methods rather than a Eiffel tutorial

• Bertrand Meyer: Eiffel, the Language - ISBN 0-13-247925-7
• Bertrand Meyer: Touch of Class: Learning to Program Well with Objects and Contracts - Springer 2009, ISBN 978-3-540-92144-8
• IDL Eiffel CORBA Binding - By Tower Technology Corp., Cindy de la Torre Cicalese of George Washington University and Kim Rochat of IBM. - Initial proposal for standardisation by Tower Technology.
• Kim Waldén & Jean-Marc Nerson: Seamless Object-Oriented Software
• Richard Wiener: An Object-Oriented Introduction to Computer Science using Eiffel - Prentice-Hall 1996, ISBN 0-13-183872-5
• Richard Wiener: Object-Oriented Introduction to Data Structures Using Eiffel - Prentice-Hall 1997, ISBN 0-13-185588-3
• Pete Thomas & Ray Weedon: Object-Oriented Programming in Eiffel (Second Edition) - Addison-Wesley 1997, ISBN 0-201-33131-4
• Jean-Marc Jézéquel: Object-Oriented Software Engineering with Eiffel - Addison-Wesley 1996, ISBN 0-201-63381-7
• Bertrand Meyer: Reusable Software. The base Object-Oriented Component Libraries - Prentice-Hall 1994, ISBN 0-13-245499-8
• Bertrand Meyer: An automatic technique for static deadlock prevention - 2014
• Carlo Furia, Bertrand Meyer, Sergey Velder: Loop invariants: Analysis, Classification and Examples ACM Computing Surveys September 2014

Introductory articles

• Joab Jackson: Eiffel: The language that OOP forgot?
• Coryoth: Why Eiffel Might Be Worth a Second Look
• Justin R. Erenkrantz: What is Eiffel?
• Michael Floyd: THE OBJECT D'ART: Application frameworks are the new frontier - 1993
• John C. Dvorak: Eiffel and the Attack on Java - PC Magazine 1997

Tutorial

• ISE Eiffel Tutorial

On-line courses

• Marco Piccioni, Bertrand Meyer and Nadia Polikarpova: Art, Magic, Science - "Learn the basics of Information Technology and how to write quality programs in this introductory computer science course."

Note, closed for new participants but all course material is online if you want to do some self learning.

Links

• USENET comp.lang.eiffel - Low volume group

Standards

• Bertrand Meyer: Standard Eiffel (revision of preceding entry), ongoing, 1997-present.
• NICE - The "Nonprofit International Consortium for Eiffel" organisation, did some of the work on standards prior to ECMA-367.
• ECMA-367 Eiffel: Analysis, Design and Programming Language - 2nd edition (June 2006) - The first international formal Eiffel standard, later adopted by ISO as ISO/IEC 25436:2006.