A week ago, we started the cycle of intermediate releases of 6.2. They can be found on the EiffelStudio development site at http://eiffelstudio.origo.ethz.ch.

Following on from http://www.eiffelroom.com/blog/colin_adams/correctness_conditions_for_calling_an_agent, I have thought about the following scheme (it would require ECMA to be amended to require a tag on assertions, but this should be done anyway. Also, the tag would have to be unique with all the preconditions for a given feature - likewise for postconditions.):

<eiffel> class ROUTINE

Since ECMA allows class texts to be written as either sequences of CHARACTER_8 of CHARACTER_32 (which although not properly specified yet, we can assume means Latin-1 or Unicode), there arises the question of to what extent the two can be mixed.

I was recently reading the paper "From Design Patterns to Reusable Components: The Factory Library by Karine Arnout and Bertrand Meyer" and I noticed that although they had succeeded in turning the pattern "Abstract Factory" into a component, the resulting class (ABSTRACT_FACTORY) did not have a sound contract.

I was pleased to see that EiffelStudio 6.0 now eliminates the need for an ECF file - all you need to do is supply the name of a root class, and it will compile your program for you.

This opens up some fascinating possibilities.

Thanks to the ECMA committee, we already have nested functions: <eiffel> class TEST

create

make

feature

make is -- Execute test. do

Following an article by Roger Osmond Auto-Increment_Proposal, I propose the following additions.

To both classes INTEGER_GENERAL and CHARACTER_GENERAL, add features successor and predecessor, both queries returning like Current.

I have been disappointed in the quality of the ISO standard for Eiffel. In fact I would be ashamed to point to it in order to show-off Eiffel.

For one, it has far too many typographical errors.

For another, some areas appear to be under-specified. For example, Unicode.