Re: Ada vs Eiffel

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 10/14/19 4:05 PM, Saša Janiška wrote:
> 
> However, it pushes just OOP paradigm, but it looks as simpler language
> to learn/master with somewhat similar compiler licenses - expensive for
> commercial apps and free when using GPL.[1] Both languages seems not to
> attract too many open-source enthusiasts and not used in many FLOSS
> projects, but providing bindings for GTK (although GtkAda does support
> GTK3, while EiffelStudio is GTK2 only)...

Note that with Ada, at least, you can obtain free compilers that do not impose 
the GPL on your program.

> Now, I'd like to hear from more experienced people here if You can share
> some pro/cons between Ada & Eiffel?

In real-world software, Ada's separation of package specification and body turns 
out to be very important. Eiffel lacks this. Ada's separation of encapsulation 
and information hiding (packages) from the type system is also very important. 
I'm not familiar enough with Eiffel to know whether it has something like this, 
but many other languages only provide encapsulation and information hiding 
through types. Finally, Ada's high-level concurrency features are very important 
for correctly modeling problem domains that are inherently concurrent, such as 
GUIs. I think Eiffel lacks anything similar.

 > I'm studying some subject and would like to start working on
 > accompanying desktop GUI application. My dev environment is Linux
 > (Debian Sid), but would like to be able to provide application for both
 > Windows & MAC OS.

An easy way to build portable GUI applications is to use Gnoga. As it uses a 
browser for the GUI, it is completely portable between platforms.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries."
Monty Python & the Holy Grail
06