Abstract
A number of individual concepts embodied in Eiffel were present in previous languages, notably Simula 67, Ada and Alphard. However the design has brought in many new contributions.
From the language standpoint, one may quote the safe treatment of multiple inheritance through renaming, the combination between genericity and inheritance, disciplined polymorphism by explicit redefinition, the integration of the assertion/invariant mechanism with inheritance, a clean interface with external routines, and the introduction of full static typing into an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance.
From the implementation standpoint, a number of our solutions are original: constant-time routine access, separate compilation with automatic configuration management in an object-oriented world, support for debugging and automatic interface documentation, support for the preparation of deliverable software packages.
More generally, we believe quite frankly that Eiffel is the first full-scale effort enabling developers of practical software systems to take advantage of object-oriented techniques in a manner consistent with the newest concepts of software engineering.
We first designed Eiffel for our own needs as software developers and, now that we have used it extensively for small and large developments alike, we wouldn't trade it for anything else. We hope that this article will have inoculated the reader with at least some of our enthusiasm.
Trademarks: Unix (AT&T Bell Laboratories); Ada (AJPO); Objective C (Productivity Products International); VAX (Digital Equipment Corporation); Smalltalk (Xerox); Eiffel (Interactive Software Engineering, Inc.).
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Meyer, B., Nerson, JM., Matsuo, M. (1987). Eiffel: Object-oriented design for software engineering. In: Nichols, H., Simpson, D. (eds) ESEC '87. ESEC 1987. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 289. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022115
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0022115
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