db@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Dave Berry) (03/06/90)
In article <4864@odin.SGI.COM> shap@delrey.sgi.com (Jonathan Shapiro) writes: > >Bertrand's papers convinced me long ago not to take Eiffel seriously. Would you back up your position with some technical information? I'm quite interested in Eiffel and criticisms of it. >Eiffel has a few good ideas cribbed from some earlier languages. Unlike C++, of course :-). Seriously, taking ideas from previous languages is the easy part. Fitting them together coherently is a lot harder. (We can debate whether Eiffel achieves this, of course). Some ideas in Eiffel are new to me; I don't think I've seen preconditons and postconditions incorporated into a language before, and their integration with the exception mechanism is definitely interesting. >It ain't the worlds ultimate programming language. There's no such beast. Dave Berry, LFCS, Edinburgh Uni. db%lfcs.ed.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk "The thought of someone sharing one's own preferences without also sharing one's aversions strikes most people as utterly inconceivable." - C. A. Tripp.