Re: smalltalk vs. Ada

[Ed Falis <efalis@mediaone.net>]

Mark Lundquist wrote:

> Eiffel is probably worth looking at.  It's a pure class-oriented language
> that supports multiple inheritance.  It embodies a philosophy called "design
> by contract" that really seems like it belongs in Ada too, but nobody can
> quite figure out where to make it fit.  Eiffel does not really have any
> concept of interface and implementation being textually separated, so like
> Java the methods are written in-line as part of the class definition.  I
> much prefer the Ada approach where you have a specification and a body.
> From what I've seen, Ada people seem to have a lot of respect for Eiffel as
> a well-designed language, so I basically regard it positively even though
> I've never actually used it :-).
>

I have.  It's a pleasure - much less "plumbing" to do OOP compared to Ada, if
that's what you want to do.  The MI facilities work really well (unlike C++),
the syntax is clean like Ada, and DbC is very useful (though pragma Assert in
Ada gets you most of the way there).  It's much weaker in terms of portability
of code between compilers than Ada is.  And it's not quite there yet for
concurrency, or IMO real-time and systems programming.  Garbage collection also
removes a lot of plumbing for general kinds of applications.  If you can't
tell, Ada and Eiffel are my favorite languages.

- Ed