Eiffel Standard 367  Eiffel Software is pleased to announce that on 21 June 2005 the Ecma general assembly adopted standard 367

Eiffel Standard

Standard ECMA-367: Eiffel analysis, design and programming language
 
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.