noren@dinl.uucp (Charles Noren) (03/10/90)
I know I'm wasting bandwidth, but could some kind person give
me a brief description of Eiffel?
My situation is as follows:
I'm on a prototype development project where we have already
developed 30K lines of C code on a Sun 3 Workstation.
Our application integrates a commercial graphics package
(DataViews) and a relational database (Ingres).
We are make some major enhancements to our application, including going
over to an Object-Oriented database (Gemstone).
Our team has flexibility in choosing its tools. We are basically
C and UNIX hackers but have been captivated by the Object-Oriented
paradigm as exemplified by Gemstone (which uses a Smalltalk model).
We are considering going to Objective-C because it appears we can
use all our old code while we provided OO enhancements to it and
gradually evolve the rest of it to an OO design. We are concerned
that our software will port to a variety of machines, at least to
VAX's, but Silicon Graphics as well as other workstations would
be nice.
Some questions (which really show my ignorance):
1. Is Eiffel C-like in some way or is it completely different?
2. How is Eiffel OO paradigm similar and different to the
Smalltalk paradigm?
3. Can I incrementally add Eiffel code to our C application?
Would this be done by linking separately compiled Eiffel code
to our C object code or done as with Objective-C (or C++) by
adding Eiffel "superset" code directly at the source level.
4. Does Eiffel interface well to the native operating system calls?
5. What kind of class library comes with an standard Eiffel
environment? How does this compare to the Objective-C
class libraries?
6. What are the execution speeds of Eiffel compared to C and
Objective-C? Of much less concern, what are the run image sizes?
7. What are the system requirements to install and use Eiffel
(do I need 16MB ram with an extra 100MB of disk...)?
8. Is there a vendor who could let us have an evaluation copy of
Eiffel for 45 days (90 days?)?
9. What is the cost of an Eiffel environment? Does any of it
come unbundled? What is the cost of the options? Is there
a network license (our Suns are NFS'ed together)?
Thanks in advance for your responses.
--
Chuck Noren
NET: ncar!dinl!noren
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