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== Older comments (2004 or so?) ==
This all reads a bit like advertising copy for the ISE commercial product. Is there someone out there who actually knows Eiffel, but also knows something else and can give a more realistic appraisal. (Yes, it does look like a nice language, but there are other nice languages, and this stuff is just over the top.)
-- Geronimo Jones.
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I have taken out a lot of preachiness in the recent changes to the "
Also, I removed unsubstantiated and inflamatory claims that Eiffel compilers are somehow "smarter" than C++ compilers. The discussion of moving runtime analysis to compile time presumably refers to the SmartEiffel compiler's ability to devirtualize method calls, and even to inline dynamically dispatched methods. However, this alone (while clever) is no great compiler breakthrough---Self and Smalltalk have had devirtualization for years---and it certainly doesn't allow SmartEiffel to claim that it's "smarter" than C++ compilers (some of which, in fact, can also do some devirtualization). On the contrary, SmartEiffel produces C code, and therefore leaves all the difficult aspects of compilation to the C++ compiler (eg. optimization, register assignment, etc.).
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For what it's worth, I think the section ''Elegance, simplicity, or fascism?'' is really silly. There are a variety of languages that are simple and more high-level than C, and these comments could apply to any one of them. Moreover, "clever coding tricks" are not what I'd call optimization hints to the compiler; they are hand-optimizations. Finally, "Eiffel seeks to produce a quality software system over anything else" seems to imply that other languages are not designed for this purpose, which is silly — even C was not designed primarily for performance. ''Fascism'' is pretty over-the-top too — I dare anyone to design a "fascist" language. I'm seriously considering deleting this whole section, if there are no objections. [[User:Dcoetzee|Deco]] 21:13, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)
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What's [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eiffel_programming_language&diff=52354486&oldid=51516199 wrong] with starting a sentence with "begun"? --[[User:P3d0|P3d0]] 19:57, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
== July 2006: this page should describe the language! ==
A general look at this page (end of July 2006) suggests that it is mostly written from the viewpoint of comparison to other O-O languages and that a much better job can be done of capturing the real flavor of Eiffel. For example there is an inordinate amount of space devoted to trivial matters like typesetting conventions, but almost nothing about the core of the language: mechanisms such as multiple inheritance (mentioned, but no explanation of renaming etc.), once routines, constrained genericity, conversion, agents etc. Time permitting I hope to expand the article in the next few weeks so that in the end it will give a neutral but accurate picture of what Eiffel really is, from the viewpoint of people who actually use it on a daily basis. I also hope to add a few elements about the underlying methodology, without which it's hard to understand Eiffel, and to remove statements of opinion to replace them by more factual information.
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