problems/risks due to programming language

[Bob Weiner]

[Please pardon and disregard my last message which was inadvertently
posted prior to my writing it.  This is the intended message.]

In article <264 at eiffel.UUCP> bertrand at eiffel.UUCP (Bertrand Meyer) writes:

> We have written tens of thousands of
> lines of typed, reusable object-oriented software, including libraries
> that are used daily by hundreds of people.

As a user and supporter of Dr. Meyer's work on Eiffel, I feel qualified
to take exception with his statement above.  I certainly am unaware of
any code that ISE (Dr. Meyer's company) has not yet released publicly
but I hesitate to label the present set of Eiffel class libraries from
ISE as 'tens of thousands of lines of ... reusable ... software'.

It is true that the code may be reused, as may any code, but the present
state of the libraries does not put them in the class of what I believe
any experienced developer would want in reusable classes.  More
precisely:

There are no performance characteristics given with any of the classes.

There is little in the way of documentation explaining the protocols
used by each class and the single line public comments associated with
most class features (routines and attributes) mask some often needed
information about the code internals.  That is, very often the external
specifications of features in these classes are quite incomplete.

There is hardly any internal feature documentation.

The class indexing provided with V2.2 is extremely spotty.


I should also say that most of these libraries do work as expected and
ISE is very generous with their source code licensing.  Additionally,
AT&T provides no significant class library with their C++ compiler;
hence I would definitely choose a broad working class library over none
at all (such commercially supported libraries will come, but they are
not here today).

My main point is that I simply can't imagine developing a system that
uses the Eiffel libraries without examining the source code.  Development
through conformance to external specifications is truly my hope for when
we reach the dawn of 'reusable software components'.
-- 
Bob Weiner, Motorola, Inc.,   USENET:  ...!gatech!uflorida!novavax!weiner