Eiffel

Overview

• Proprietary product of Interactive Software Engineering, Inc.
• Designed by Bertrand Meyer around 1986

• Compiled programming language
• Object oriented
• Useful for telecommunication systems, financial applications, teaching purposes, rapid prototyping
• Syntax is similar to Pascal

Features

• Completely object-oriented
• Every type is based on a class, including basic types such as integer, boolean, real, character, string, array
• Eiffel is strongly typed (every entity has a declared type)
• Static typing (all type errors are caught at compile time, rather than run time)

• Assertions

• Preconditions
• Postconditions
• Invariants

• The preconditions of a routine are the responsibility of the caller.
• The postconditions of a routine are the responsibility of the routine.
• Invariants are properties that apply to all instances of a class and that must be preserved by all methods of the class.
• If the preconditions, postconditions, or invariants are violated, an exception is raised.

• Exception handling
• Method overriding
• Multiple inheritance
• Feature renaming; a class can give a new name to an inherited feature
• Unconstrained genericity

Case sensitivity

• Eiffel is case insensitive.