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EiffelWorld Electronic Newsletter -- Vol. 28, No. 2 - March 2005
In this Issue of EiffelWorld:
1. Eiffel News
- Eiffel ECMA standardisation committee report
- EiffelStudio quick-start package special (last chance to take advantage of
this great offer)
2. In the Press
- Another exclusive EiffelWorld column by Dr. Bertrand Meyer
- Laser 2005
3. Eiffel Corner
- eposix announcement
- New Eiffel Games
- User Group meetings
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EIFFEL NEWS
* Eiffel ECMA standardisation committee report
The last meeting of the Eiffel ECMA standardization committee took place in
Santa Barbara from February 25 to February 28. The group is now working at
finalizing the official document of its standard proposal.
* EiffelStudio quick-start package special -- last chance to receive a big
discount when you start a project in Eiffel.
Looking to get a new project started? Do you want little initial investment?
Nothing easier! Equip your team today with EiffelStudio licenses through our
quick-start package. Choose from three different packages, all at incredibly low
prices. You will be glad you took advantage of this opportunity. For more
details on this offer visit:
http://www.eiffel.com/products/studio/quickstart_package.html
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IN THE PRESS
* New EiffelWorld column by Dr. Bertrand Meyer
Write it right or right the wrongs?
In the continued search for ways of making systems that we can really trust,
there's long been two opposing trends: pushing for better techniques and tools
to produce software that will work the first time around ("Write it right"); and
hoping for tools that, accepting programs have bugs, will catch them ("Right the
wrongs").
Forty years ago (following some early insights of Alan Turing) researchers
started to investigate "program proving". After a while they accepted that you
can't prove a program unless it's been written right from the start with that
goal in mind; and it seemed, in research at least, that the "a priorists" had
gained the upper hand. All the while, however, tools for static analysis and
debugging continued to improve.
Eiffel is firmly into "Write it right", with its constant emphasis on design
principles, on contracts, on structure. I noted in my last column how bizarre I
find the idea of expecting software to be written any good old way, and then
having some magical tool extracts the contracts for you. Of course the "Right
the wrongs" part is there too, as with the sophisticated debugger of
EiffelStudio (watch for new advances in forthcoming versions) and the work done
at ETH to generate tests completely automatically from contracts.
The field will for still quite some time need to rely on both approaches. For
those readers of EiffelWorld interested in following the progress in the field,
let me point out a milestone event that will take place in Zurich in October
(10-13) and to which there is still time to submit a position paper: the
conference on
Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments
ETH Zurich, 10-13 October 2005
http://vstte.ethz.ch
The conference is the brainchild of Tony Hoare as part of his relentless efforts
to start a "Grand Challenge" on software verification. It is an official IFIP
conference, specifically its Technical Committee 2 (Software) and more
specifically still its Working Group 2.3 (Programming Methodology).
The event is part of an extensive program of celebrations for the 150th
anniversary of ETH Zurich. Sponsors include ETH, Microsoft Research and the US
National Science Foundation.
The roster of organizers and invited speakers reads like a who's who of the
pioneers and innovators in formal methods, program proving, model checking,
abstract interpretation, program refinement etc. I know that it will be a
watershed event.
The conference is by invitation only and the number of seats is limited. The
best way to get invited is to submit a position paper (click "Submit" at
http://vstte.ethz.ch). It would be great to
have a few position papers from the readers of this newsletter, showcasing their
Eiffel experience.
In the meantime, continue to write it right, but don't forget all the same to
chase the wrongs.
--Bertrand Meyer
* LASER 2005: Software engineering for concurrent and real-time systems,
September 11 - 17, 2005 Elba, Italy
Research in software engineering is making steady progress, too much of which
unfortunately remains unknown to practitioners. The aim of the LASER school is
to distribute the results of that research to a wider audience and in turn
foster new ideas. The school is intended for professional software engineers and
managers who want to benefit from recent advances in software technology as well
as for researchers (including PhD students).
The 2005 LASER school brings together six of the best experts in the field of
concurrent and real-time systems. Each will present a series of six lectures on
his or her latest research efforts. The six speakers are: Laura Dillon (Michigan
State University), Bertrand Meyer (ETH Zurich/Eiffel Software), Jay Misra
(University of Texas at Austin), Amir Pnueli (Technion), Wolfgang Pree
(University of Salzburg), Joseph Sifakis (Verimag).
For more information and registration visit:
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/laser/2005/
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EIFFEL CORNER
* Eposix announcement
eposix is an almost complete mapping of Standard C and POSIX to Eiffel developed
by Berend de Boer. It does not only gives Eiffel programmers access to the raw
POSIX API, but it also offers many abstractions on top of this. eposix includes
clients for the most popular Internet protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, FTP and IRC.
It also includes an embedded HTTP server.
eposix works on Windows. eposix supports the cygwin layer, but eposix also
offers an abstraction layer that talks straight to the Windows API.
eposix requires Gobo 3.3 (with some help, see manual) or higher.
eposix has been tested on Linux 2.4.29, FreeBSD 4.11, Solaris 10x86, QNX 6.2 and
Windows 2000. To download eposix visit:
http://www.pobox.com/~berend/eposix/index.html#download
* New Eiffel Games
Now available, an ongoing collection of games created by students of ETH Zurich
using Eiffel. These games were created using the ESDL library and are available
on various platforms. They are accessible at:
http://se.inf.ethz.ch/download/games/
* User Group meetings
Colorado Usergroup meeting -- The last Thursday of the month at 6:30 pm at
Fowler Software Design. For directions to Fowler Software please visit:
http://www.fowlersoftware.com/
Bay Area Friends of Eiffel -- meet in Orinda at Axa Rosenberg. Meeting agenda is
available by contacting Greg Compestine, gcompestine@axarosenberg.com.
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The Eiffel Software Team
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