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. (This comment is now largely obsolete due to much work on the page. Thanks guys.) -- Geronimo Jones.
I have taken out a lot of preachiness in the recent changes to the "facism" section and tried to make it more factual; however, it was so absurd to begin with (and I am such an Eiffel advocate) that it may require more work.
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.).
Silly section
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. Deco 21:13, 15 Nov 2004 (UTC)