bglenden@colobus.cv.nrao.edu (Brian Glendenning) (03/20/91)
Questions from an Eiffel beginner (we are going to try some
prototyping in Eiffel, and decide about implementation later - likely
fall back is C++).
1. Does anyone have any comments on the paper (which I have not yet
found) called something like:
"After the divorce: Reflections on using Eiffel at Cognos" which has a
reference of something like:
SOOPPA Proceedings , page 66, year ???
(What is SOOPA?).
Someone who has heard that we are considering Eiffel has recommended
this paper as a conterargument.
2. Conspicuously absent from the Eiffel libraries book are what I'd
call "math" classes - complex, matrix and the like. Do such exist, or
is Eiffel unsuited to problems that have significant numeric work
(ours does) (I realize that much of the implementation might be in
another language with a class wrapper). Thank you.
Brian
--
Brian Glendenning - National Radio Astronomy Observatory
bglenden@nrao.edu bglenden@nrao.bitnet (804) 296-0286richieb@bony1.bony.com (Richard Bielak) (03/21/91)
In article <BGLENDEN.91Mar19173301@colobus.cv.nrao.edu> bglenden@colobus.cv.nrao.edu (Brian Glendenning) writes: [...] >1. Does anyone have any comments on the paper (which I have not yet >found) called something like: > >"After the divorce: Reflections on using Eiffel at Cognos" which has a >reference of something like: > SOOPPA Proceedings , page 66, year ??? >(What is SOOPA?). > >Someone who has heard that we are considering Eiffel has recommended >this paper as a conterargument. > SOOPA was a small OOP conference at the Marist College (in Poughkeepsie, N.Y). I was there and I heard the presentation of the above paper. Most of the complaints in the paper were about ISE's 2.1 Eiffel compiler, not about the language. The major problems mentioned by the article, were corrected in 2.2 and 2.3 compiler. People at Cognos were trying to use the same Eiffel source to generate a program for few different machines. The idea was, that there would be few machine dependent classes and the the rest of the code would be the same. They run into problems, when members of a rather large project team were making small changes, and this resulted in long recompilations. The speaker admitted that large part of Eiffel's failure at Cognos had nothing to do with Eiffel, but was a project management problem (the usual stuff, too much to do in too little time). I'll be happy to mail you a photo-copy of this paper (as soon as I find who borrowed my copy of the SOOPA Proceedings :-) ). ...richie -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Richie Bielak (212)-815-3072 | "You don't have to be cleverer than | | Internet: richieb@bony.com | other people, you just have to be | | Bang: uunet!bony1!richieb | one day earlier." - Leo Szilard |