Re: A serious question from naive beginner...

Colnet Dominique wrote:

>> Gobo always made its best to support compilers that claimed
>> to support Eiffel. SE said that they are not Eiffel anymore.
> No. We are Eiffel :-)
> ECMA Eiffel is no longer Eiffel.

Well no, Dominique, that is not true. SmartEiffel is very different  
from classic ETL2 Eiffel. So will ECMA Eiffel, once ISE Eiffel  
eventually implements it. But ECMA is officially Standard Eiffel;  
it's disingenuous to suggest it is not.

Here are some differences between SE and classic Eiffel:

o Non-conforming inheritance (the poorly-chosen "insert" keyword).
o By default classes do not conform to ANY.
o Those weird "emoticon" operators instead of assignment attempt.
o Case-sensitivity and compiler-enforced capitalisation conventions.
o Contravariant (or whatever your preferred term for it is) agent  
arguments.

And some differences between ECMA and classic Eiffel:

o Non-conforming inheritance ("inherit {NONE}"): not yet implemented  
by ISE.
o Void-safety instead of assignment attempt: not yet implemented by ISE.
o Conversions, aliases and bracket indexing.
o No-variant agent arguments: not yet implemented by ISE.

Both of these lists are far from complete.

- Peter Gummer