Re: The disturbing myth of Eiffel portability

[paul.johnson@gecm.com (Paul Johnson)]

In article <vwj20dodc99.fsf@osfb.aber.ac.uk>, pcg@aber.ac.uk says...

>Indeed one of the _major_ design goals of C++, according to its authors,
>is to allow the programmer to define new datatypes [...]
>
>In this respect Eiffel is rather less attractive; user defined Eiffel
>datatypes are not quite on a par with builtin ones either as to syntax
>(which IMNHO is not important) or as to performance (which matters for
>very fine granularity datatypes).

Syntax first: I think you will find that the built-in Eiffel data types
are on a par with the user-defined ones: unlike C++ things like integer
and array are defined as classes.

Efficiency: see the thread about benchmarks.  Where exactly do you think
that user defined data types lose performance?

>  It is rather significant IMNHO that Eiffel 3 has now expanded
>  datatypes, which however small a detail, allows for _considerable_
>  improvements in performance, in particular asd to garbage collection.

More importantly, it has allowed the builtin data types to become part of
the class hierarchy.

Paul.

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