Eiffel

Object oriented structured programming language in the Algol family, originally designed by Bertrand Meyer and partially inspired by Simula. 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.

A list of OS/2 implementations of Eiffel

• ISE Eiffel - Commercial - Discontinued
• SmallEiffel - Open Source - Discontinued
• Tower Eiffel - Commercial - Discontinued

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.

A list of DOS implementations of Eiffel

• SmallEiffel - Open Source - Discontinued

A list of Eiffel implementations that run under Java

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

Publications

• Bertrand Meyer: Object Oriented Software Construction - ISBN 0136291554 - In Print

The book where Eiffel was first described, but is actually a textbook of object-oriented methods rather than a Eiffel tutorial, originally published in 1988.

• Bertrand Meyer: Eiffel, the Language - ISBN 0-13-247925-7 - In Print
• Frieder Monninger: Eiffel. Objektorientiertes Programmieren in der Praxis Gebundene Ausgabe - Heise Heinz - 1998 - ISBN-10: 3882290285 - ISBN-13: 978-3882290288 - Out of print

By the gent behind the old Visual Eiffel compiler & IDE.

• 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.

Related articles

• Joab Jackson: Eiffel: The language that OOP forgot?
• Coryoth: Why Eiffel Might Be Worth a Second Look
• Justin R. Erenkrantz: What is Eiffel?

Tutorials and other learning material

• ISE Eiffel Tutorial

Links

USENET

• comp.lang.eiffel - Low volume group - Go to the Google groups version if your ISP does not offer USENET access or you are in any other way newsgroup challenged.

Standards

• [www.eiffel-nice.org/index.html NICE] - The "Nonprofit International Consortium for Eiffel" organisation, created some of the early standards.
• Standard ECMA-367 Eiffel: Analysis, Design and Programming Language - 2nd edition (June 2006) - The first international Eiffel standard.