Void safety clashes with DbC (it forces us to indulge in defensive programming).

On November 26th the W3C brought disgrace upon themselves by publishing an eyes-wide-open deliberate lie - the so-called "Fifth Edition" of XML 1.0.

This is actually a new version of XML, masquerading as 1.0. Most other W3C recommendations that refer to XML 1.0 are now automatically non-conforming, including XML Namespaces!

Eiffel is missing from this list. Anyone fancy adding it on?

Following on from my comment in my post about class fibonacci that Haskell manages integers better than we do, I extended my test program for Fibonacci numbers to make a call to a Haskell function.

Timings and output printing F(11199) (compiled with ISE 6.3) are:

Class FIBONACCI (FreeELKS) - 2ms prints: -1880045342

Class MA_DECIMAL - 22

I was somewhat surprised to see this class in FreeELKS.

WHY? It doesn't appear to be used by anything else.

Anyway, I was rather intrigued, and gave it a try (I was interested in timing the n_th number).

I soon spotted that it was giving errors, and it was immediately obvious why. Here is a copy of the code:

	i_th (i: INTEGER_32): INTEGER_32

This week I have again been considering the issue of the correctness of code that receives an agent (the last time I looked at this was page:correctness_conditions_2_for_calling_an_agent).

I return to the original class which provoked my initial ponderings on this - Karine Arnout's (now Karine Bezault) `FACTORY'</ei

Mark Howard, director of software engineering at AXA Rosenberg, describes why we chose Eiffel for our expert system.

I'm just reading Yhc/Erlang/Proof of concept.

Perhaps some enterprising young student would take a stab at compiling Eiffel to BEAM? Then we'd get real concurrency.

Not a trivial task.

Eiffel is based (according to Wikipedia) on a set of principles:

• Design by contract
• Command-query separation
• Uniform access principle
• Single choice principle
• Open-closed principle
• Option-Operand separation

I have just released Gestalt 1.0, an XSLT 2.0 command line interpreter written in 100% pure Eiffel, on the suspecting wide world.

The released 32-bit binaries for Linux and Windows were compiled with GEC and the Boehm garbage collector (7.0). Any offers to contribute additional binaries will be accepted.