Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
I should occasionally present examples of the strange reasons people sometimes invoke for not using Eiffel. In an earlier article [1] I gave the basic idea common to all these reasons, but there are many variants, in the general style “I am responsible for IT policy and purchases for IBM, the US Department of … Read more
The C2Eif translator developed by Marco Trudel takes C code and translates it into Eiffel; it produces not just a literal translation but a re-engineering version exhibiting object-oriented properties. Trudel defended his PhD thesis last Friday at ETH (the examiners were Hausi Muller from Victoria University, Manuel Oriol from ABB, Richard Paige from the University … Read more
A core aspect of our verification work is the use of “strong” contracts, which express sophisticated specification properties without requiring a separate specification language: even for advanced properties, there is no need for a separate specification language, with special notations such as those of first-order logic; instead, one can continue to rely, in the … Read more
As part of a Festschrift volume for Martin Glinz of the university of Zurich I wrote a paper [1] describing a general approach to requirements that I have been practicing and developing for a while, and presented in a couple of talks. The basic idea is to rely on object-oriented techniques, including contracts for … Read more
In modeling object-oriented programs, for purposes of verification (proofs) or merely for a better understanding, we are faced with the unique “general relativity” property of OO programming: all the operations you write (excluding non-OO mechanisms such as static functions) are expressed relative to a “current object” which changes repeatedly during execution. More precisely at the … Read more
Actually it is not a musical but an extensive survey. I have long been fascinated by the notion of loop invariant, which describes the essence of a loop. Considering a loop without its invariant is like conducting an orchestra without a score. In this submitted survey paper written with Sergey Velder and Carlo Furia … Read more
The fundamental idea behind EIS is to support the seamless form of software development promoted and permitted by Eiffel, where all phases of a project’s lifecycle are closely linked and the code provides the ultimate reference. Since other documents are often involved, in particular a requirements document (SRS, Software Requirements Specification), it is essential to record their precise associations with elements of the software text.
We have positions open at both the PhD and Postdoc levels at the Chair of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich, the Chair of Software Engineering. As noted in an earlier article, I recently received an Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council (5 years, 2.5 million euros) on the theme “Concurrency Made Easy”; see … Read more
In the Eiffel user discussion group [1], Ian Joyner recently asked: A lot of people are now using Result as a variable name for the return value in many languages. I believe this first came from Eiffel, but can’t find proof. Or was it adopted from an earlier language? Proof I cannot offer, but … Read more