shelley@atc.sps.mot.com (Norman K. Shelley) (02/15/90)
New Desired Upgrade for Eiffel 3.0 (14Feb90) Currently Using Eiffel 2.2B Desired Features: 1.) Eiffel needs to include multiple ways to specify INTEGERs, REALs, and DOUBLEs. Users like to use hex, octal, binary, and scientific notation when writing some Eiffel code. A method of specifing a number in any base or in several variations of scientific notation would be MOST useful. Outputting a number in a user defined format would also be useful (we could add this BUT it would be useful to the community as a whole). 2.) Need the ANSI "C" equivalent of __FILE__ and __LINE__. Could also use such functions as "class_name: STRING" which returns the class name of Current and "routine_name: STRING" which returns the routine name of the routine from which it was called These should be probably be placed in ANY.e. 3.) Need to be able to specify the routines to be traced/debugged. The ability to say all routines "but" these routines would also be MOST useful. 4.) Need a routine like STRING's "to_c" for ARRAY so that an Eiffel array could be packaged by the Eiffel runtime into a compatible C array. 5.) How about extending Eiffel to not only allow calling external C routines but also calling C macros i.e. inlining C code the way some C compilers allow one to escape to assembly right within a C routine. In the Eiffel runtime libraries there are many places where a C routine just does a simple wrapping of some C code e.g. the runtime C code that prints out a double is just a wrapper around "fprintf (f,"%g", number);" therefore there are two subroutine calls when just one is sufficient. 6.) The routines "to_ordinal: STRING" and "to_ordinal_symbol: STRING" should be added to the class INTEGER. For the INTEGER of value 2 the former outputs "second" and the latter outputs "2nd". "to_integer: STRING" should probably be renamed "to_cardinal: STRING". Norman Shelley Motorola - ATC 2200 W. Broadway AZ09/M350 Mesa, AZ 85202 ...!uunet!dover!atc!shelley shelley@atc.sps.mot.com (602) 962-2473