Re: GNAT packages in Linux distributions

["Yannick Duchêne (Hibou57)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

Le Tue, 11 May 2010 19:35:43 +0200, Pascal Obry <pascal@obry.net> a écrit:
> Eiffel in contrast is far more easier to program, but well the
> constraints (pre/post conditions, invariants) are only checked at
> runtime. Problems will be found when this part of the code is run.
>
> I cannot say I prefer one or the other. I've stopped programming in
> Eiffel long time ago now. Both are targeting different level of safety
> and security to me.
>
> I can say that my second best/preferred language is Eiffel. It is a
> clean language, well designed that encourage good programming.
>
> Pascal.
I remember I had the idea to leave Eiffel for one main first reason : its  
lack in the basic types area. The set of basic type was (I say “was”, as I  
don't know if the Eiffel ISO standard has evolved since) too much  
restricted and there was no way to create proper new ones. There was a  
good reason to that : Eiffel is far from low level ; it is unlikely you  
will be able to conceive a device driver with Eiffel.

I'm not pointing that to say Eiffel is not nice because of that exact  
point ; this is just a matter of requirement.

That said, as long as there are some fault tolerance and as long as low  
level is not involved, it is a nice one, which as you said, may give you  
some good ideas and good inspirations ;) Further more, there was a plan  
 from Bertrand Meyer (do not have the reference any more, sorry) to promote  
Eiffel as a language for the web platform (I mean client side, that is,  
browsers). If this would have been a success, we may actually have Eiffel  
instead of JavaScript for web applications.

Eiffel would have been well suited to this area : semantic favorable to  
interpretation and execution of remote stuff (no pointers to method, just  
references, which can mean Anything on the other side), clean enough,  
*accessible enough*, promoting some good though for peoples willing to  
receive these.


-- 
pragma Asset ? Is that true ? Waaww... great