| The 89th
Ecma General Assembly held in Amsterdam, on June 21, 2005, approved the Eiffel Ecma standard under Ecma standard 367: Eiffel Analysis, Design and
Programming Language. Since its inception, Eiffel has stood for reliability,
robustness and stability. Over the last twenty years, Eiffel Software has
continually worked to ensure that its products continue to give the
programming community the reliability it needs. The Ecma Standard is the
result of these
efforts.
Ecma is the major international standards organization for the computer
industry. Ecma Eiffel is the product of three years of extensive work by a
committee of Eiffel experts and representatives of large Eiffel users. It is
a major advance in Eiffel technology which closely reflects the needs of the
Eiffel community, with special attention to the most advanced and demanding
Eiffel applications. Forthcoming versions of EiffelStudio, starting with
5.6, will progressively integrate all the new Ecma mechanisms.
The Standard specifies:
- The form of legal basic constituents of Eiffel texts, or lexical properties
of the language;
- The structure of legal Eiffel texts made of lexically legal constituents, or
syntax properties;
- Supplementary restrictions imposed on syntactically legal Eiffel texts, or
validity properties;
- The computational effect of executing valid Eiffel texts, or semantic
properties;
- Some requirements on a conforming implementation of Eiffel, such as the
ability to produce certain forms of automatic documentation.
The Standard does not specify:
- The requirements that a computing environment must meet to support the
translation, execution and other handling of Eiffel texts;
- The semantic properties of an Eiffel text if it or its data exceed the
capacity of a particular computing environment;
- The mechanisms for translating Eiffel texts into a form that can be executed
in a computing environment;
- The mechanisms for starting the execution of the result of such a
translation;
- Other mechanisms for handling Eiffel texts and interacting with users of the
language
The Eiffel standard document is available
here.
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