Masterminds of Programming

Chapter 17. Eiffel

Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed primarily by Bertrand Meyer in 1985, now managed by a standards committee at Ecma International, which produced an ISO standard released in 2006. It provides a wide range of features now considered modern and widespread: garbage collection, generic programming, and type safety. Its most important contribution may be the idea of Design by Contract, where the language enforces interface preconditions, postconditions, and invariants; this improves the reliability and reusability of components. Eiffel’s influence is apparent in languages such as Java, Ruby, and C#.

An Inspired Afternoon

Why did you choose to create a programming language?

Bertrand Meyer: Very few people create a programming language just for the sake of it. Eiffel was born out of a necessity. I designed a programming language because I needed to write software and everything I had was unsatisfactory.

Did you need a tool to, for example, implement Design by Contract?

Bertrand: That part was obvious, but in general I needed an object-oriented language. Let me give you the context. We started a company in 1985, Interactive Software Engineering. It is now called Eiffel Software. We were actually going to build software-engineering tools. We were funded by a Japanese company to build a program editor, or a syntax-directed editor, which we did build and which enjoyed moderate success.

This was a very small company. I was still teaching at the University ...