First question was why anybody would present this using Eiffel. That's apparently answered at the bottom, but I still don't understand. Eiffel is good at being abstract or something? But isn't the code presented a concrete implementation of a single way to do things?
Eiffel is considered by some people to be one of the better programming languages (maybe even near the top of the heap, though of course a lot depends on application area you are using it for, just as with any other language). Features in it may have influenced other languages. Not sure, but I think Design by Contract is one of them - preconditions, postconditions and invariants, which can be implemented somewhat, using assertions, in languages that provide assertions. But Eiffel provides language support for them. Search for some Eiffel success stories. There was one very good one - I don't have the link right now - about someone at Hewlett Packard using it to develop software for printers, maybe a device driver, after earlier attempts using other languages turned out to have many problems - IIRC.
Edit: after a quick search, I found an article that is about the same story, of HP using Eiffel - though I don't think it is the same article I read a while ago:
``Eiffel is the perfect embedded language...'':
an interview of Christopher Creel, HP CCD (Color laserjet and Consumables Division)
How HP used ISE Eiffel to develop leading-edge printer software, used Design by Contract to preserve the work of its best designers, and in the process found bugs in its legacy software, discovered a flaw in a hardware chip, and learned a few lessons -- such as how to do in weeks what used to require months.
I've used design by contract principles (in C) in a successful middleware software that I was the team leader for, ensured (pun intended :) that my team used it extensively in the code, and the end result met its goals and was somewhat widely used in projects by the company where it was developed.
Edit 2: Bertrand Meyer is also the author of a very well-known and respected book, Object Oriented Software Construction. It's a big book. I read a lot of it, some years ago. It has some very good points in it. Bertrand Meyer is one person who seems to have thought and done a great deal about the process of software development (with a view to getting better results), on many levels, from theory through practice to industrial application.
Better is always subjective. Eiffel is not exactly in common usage in real programs. Lots of people think their language is better at something but until lots of people start using it, we don't really know.
>Better is always subjective.
True, and I implied that in my first sentence. It is well known that Eiffel is not used by a lot of people. That does not automatically mean it is not good, though.
