Hijacking

[Charles D Hixson]

Walter Bright wrote:
> eao197 wrote:
>> Eiffel has same feature for more than 20 years and it really works :)
> 
> Eiffel has many good ideas, but we must be careful thinking of Eiffel as 
> an endorsement, as it failed to catch on. I think one reason it failed 
> is because of the syntax.
My suspicion of the reason that Eiffel failed to catch on is 
the personality and resultant policies of the designer.  It 
took a long time for SmallEiffel to be released...and it's 
policies aren't that friendly, either, even though it IS GPL 
software.

OTOH, IMNSHO, Eiffel did make a few serious mistakes.  One of 
them was in forbidding two different functions (essentially 
the same) to be distinguished by their argument list, but not 
by their name.  BAD decision.

So you're right when you say "be careful", but don't attribute 
most of the failure of Eiffel to it's design.  Other factors 
predominated.

Note that D already had three branches DMD1, DMD2, and gdc. 
And that they share a lot of the same code (which keeps 
duplicate effort to a minimum).

If you want to copy organization policies, copy from Python, 
but Eiffel had very many good ideas that a compiler language 
could benefit from.  (I'm not as convinced by modern versions 
of Eiffel as I was by the earlier ones...but then I've 
basically stopped following it, because it kept breaking all 
of it's libraries with each new release.  And it never did 
become as easy to link to C as D already is.  [Now if only 
there was a decent way to manage C++ linkage.])