What?
Working with SmartEiffel I have the need for a new library from time to time, which I’ll make available here:
I also contribute to the Eiffel Wrapper Library Collection (EWLC) – on http://users.raphael-mack.de/~et/ you can see the results of a few scripts, which check out the newes trunk version of EWLC after every commit and run class_check and test on it. This is work in progress and produces very much output at the moment, but when a few more open issues are fixed, I’ll try to automatically send emails to the author when commit broke anything.
Why?
At university I heard about Eiffel, got used to contracts and the eiffel way of programming and I learned to love it. Bertrand Meyer did a good job – at least in principle. I was forced to use proprietary closed source compiler from Eiffel Software Inc (ISE) and was annoyed by that **** – say imperfect – implementation of a development environment and all the bugs in the base library. I also wanted to work with embedded systems and looked for an easy way to use a GNU cross toolchain to compile my eiffel apps. So, SmartEiffel was the right choice.
In the meantime I noticed the development of the ECMA process to make Eiffel a standard. What came out is not what I can earnestly call Eiffel. I must admit, that the SmartEiffel team also made decisions I do not support but all in all SmartEiffel is more eifflish then ECMAEiffel.
All in all: Eiffel is a very nice programming language.