Characteristics
The key characteristics of the Eiffel language include:
- An object-oriented program structure in which a class serves as the basic unit of decomposition.
- Design by contract tightly integrated with other language constructs.
- Automatic memory management, typically implemented by garbage collection.
- Inheritance, including multiple inheritance, renaming, redefinition, "select", non-conforming inheritance, and other mechanisms intended to make inheritance safe.
- Constrained and unconstrained generic programming
- A uniform type system handling both value and reference semantics in which all types, including basic types such as INTEGER, are class-based.
- Static typing
- Void safety, or static protection against calls on null references, through the attached-types mechanism.
- Agents, or objects that wrap computations, closely connected with closures and lambda calculus.
- Once routines, or routines evaluated only once, for object sharing and decentralized initialization.
- Keyword-based syntax in the ALGOL/Pascal tradition but separator-free, insofar as semicolons are optional, with operator syntax available for routines.
- Case insensitivity
- Simple Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming (SCOOP) facilitates creation of multiple, concurrently active execution vehicles at a level of abstraction above the specific details of these vehicles (e.g. multiple threads without specific mutex management).
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