Reasons for using Eiffel

Revision as of 16:42, 17 November 2006 by Manus (Talk | contribs)

The step away from the main stream of languages is a difficult one. Leaving common group makes one feel insecure. There is always the need to justify unorthodox decisions. This page tries to capture reasons to convince you, your friends, you boss, your client or your grandmother to use Eiffel and EiffelStudio.

Reasons for Eiffel

Eiffel is object-oriented 
While you might think that every modern language is calls itself object-oriented, there are very few languages that have the object-oriented paradigm so deeply integrated into the language as in Eiffel. Eiffel was built around object-orientation. Objects just feel right in Eiffel. Contracts make you understand inheritance. Even if you will change to another language later, object-orientation will never be the same to you once you have developed in Eiffel.
Eiffel is fast 
Eiffel compiles to C, which is then directly translated to the machine code of your target platform. With that you can exploit the full speed of your target architecture. Eiffel can be used in embedded environments, in
Eiffel has a garbage collector 
...
Eiffel is old 
...
Eiffel is standard 
...
Eiffel is strongly typed 
...
Eiffel has powerful constructs 
...
Eiffel is highly portable 
...
Eiffel is built on 'Design by Contract' 
...

Reasons for EiffelStudio

EiffelStudio is open-source 
...
EiffelStudio is supported by a company 
...
EiffelStudio has a power IDE 
...
EiffelStudio offers incremental compilation 
...
EiffelStudio adds run-time checking 
...
EiffelStudio has a powerful interactive debugger 
...
EiffelStudio allows you to draw UML and BON diagrams 
...