• Dee Girl <deegirl noreply.com> May 11 2008
• Yigal Chripun <yigal100 gmail.com> May 11 2008

Dee Girl <deegirl noreply.com> writes:

Yigal Chripun Wrote:

 the idea is of course take the best from each language and combine it to
 something even better.
 BTW, you really should take a look at Eiffel. for example, it has
 multiple-inheritance implemented in a completely different way than C++
 avoiding most of c++ problems with it. they have many novel ideas there
 that D can and should learn from.
 
 My perfect collection framework would be based on the Eiffel design,
 avoiding problems in the Java model and problems in the C++ model.


It is fortunate in my humble opinion that the designers of D think otherwise.
In my experience Eiffel is the worst of languages. I worked with Eiffel one
project. It was very unsafe for a compiled language. It has covariant function
arguments and covariant arrays! At least Java and D made only one mistake not
two. It has problems of dynamic languages and problems of static languages but
not many advantages of them. It is not surprising Eiffel is considered bad by
my professors and also by people in the industry. Dee Girl

Yigal Chripun <yigal100 gmail.com> writes:

Dee Girl wrote:
 Yigal Chripun Wrote:
 
 the idea is of course take the best from each language and combine
 it to something even better. BTW, you really should take a look at
 Eiffel. for example, it has multiple-inheritance implemented in a
 completely different way than C++ avoiding most of c++ problems
 with it. they have many novel ideas there that D can and should
 learn from.
 
 My perfect collection framework would be based on the Eiffel
 design, avoiding problems in the Java model and problems in the C++
 model.


 It is fortunate in my humble opinion that the designers of D think
 otherwise. In my experience Eiffel is the worst of languages. I
 worked with Eiffel one project. It was very unsafe for a compiled
 language. It has covariant function arguments and covariant arrays!
 At least Java and D made only one mistake not two. It has problems of
 dynamic languages and problems of static languages but not many
 advantages of them. It is not surprising Eiffel is considered bad by
 my professors and also by people in the industry. Dee Girl
 


I was only referring to Eiffel's collection framework which i think is a
good design. I noted that Eiffel has a different implementation of MI
than c++ but that doesn't mean i want MI in D. I like the current design
of interfaces and mixins in D instead of MI.
also, I'm familiar with the covariance issues in Eiffel. I also do not
like it's strange(IMO) syntax. fact is nothing is perfect and D does
already borrow some concepts from Eiffel like DBC.

sure, Eiffel has it problems, all languages has problems, and the
industry (or your professors for that matter) are irrelevant since there
are hundreds of different languages and non of which is the dominant
one. this only shows that there are many ways and styles for programing
and there are personal preferences involved. your professor may prefer
one solution while mine prefers another, both can be valid.
there are many academic languages that are ignored by the industry while
it prefers using different languages. would you consider cobol a good
language? the only objective way I know of to measure success of
programming languages is the size of the beard of the language creators.
there's a thread with a link to an article about that in the NG.

anyway, back to topic. I was talking about Eiffel's collection framework
 and I was saying we should take the best from each language, meaning
that specific initial design which could be improved since it's very
flexible but can be complex for users since Eiffel uses MI and doesn't
have anything like interfaces. D can take the flexibility of the design
and improve it's user friendliness.

of course, this entire post is my opinion only. feel free to disagree.
also, off topic, have you ever heard of the programming language Icon?