Minutes of the March 27 meeting of the Colorado Eiffel User's Group 
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 Minutes of the March 27 meeting of the Colorado Eiffel User's Group

  The meeting began with an informal discussion of current events, and
the recent suggestion in comp.lang.eiffel that "Eiffel" may have to be
renamed.  "Freedom from C++" seemed like one reasonable alternative!

Next the group discussed some recent activity in the Eiffel world:
    the upcoming Class Struggle,
    the pending 0.7 release of the ELJ project,
    the new Envision 1.1 release from Eiffel software
      (sorry, I can't ever remember the correct capitalization for that
one)
    the latest SmartEiffel 1.1 Beta,
    the recent, heated debate over ECMA standardization and the latest
SE Beta.

The group discussed the need for an LCD projector for future
presentations. I volunteered to investigate pricing for used models, and
Rex Fowler said that FSD should be able to share the cost of the
projector with the group. We expect to propose a plan to the group at
the next meeting for obtaining a projector.

The main course for the evening was served up by Daniel von Dinklage,
who gave a presentation on meta-programming, how it can be used to
generate Eiffel, and how Eiffel could be modified to better support MP.
Daniel's enthusiasm for this subject was contagious as he went through
his overview of metaprogramming, and by the end everyone was e{*filter*}d
about the possibilities he discussed.

After Daniel's presentation, we had an informal discussion about the
issue of immutability with Eiffel objects, immutability being a
qualifier that guarantees constancy or prevention of state change in an
object.  Daniel offered up the most interesting suggestion for the
evening: that it might be sufficient to declare attributes as being
immutable and rely on a static, whole system analysis to detect
modifying calls to an attribute and flag these as errors. This approach
addresses my main concern about using a qualifier similar to "const"in
C++ -- that being "const measles" where const declarations tend to
spread through code like some kind of disease. However, it's not clear
if this approach would hold up in the face of polymorphism, covariance
and similar issues that may be present in a complex object architecture.
Daniel plans to further develop his notion, and we will hear more about
it in the future.

In April, we'll receive a presentation from Jacob Gore, author of
"Object Structures: Building Object Oriented Software Components With
Eiffel." We'll also be getting an update on the CEUG Open Source
project, with a demonstration of the audio and video capabilities of the
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) wrapper we are developing.

Daniel's presentation can be downloaded at:
http://www.*-*-*.com/
To see Daniel's presentation,  you need to be a member of the CEUG.
Don't worry, the membership requirements aren't onerous. We just ask
that, if you are in the Denver area when a meeting occurs, that you
attend the meeting.

For information about the Eiffel Class Struggle, visit:
http://www.*-*-*.com/

For more about the ELJ project, visit:
http://www.*-*-*.com/

To read more about the Envision release, go to:
http://www.*-*-*.com/

For SmartEiffel, visit:
http://www.*-*-*.com/

To read up on SmartEiffel changes and the project's involvement with
ECMA, check the mailing list archive at:
http://www.*-*-*.com/

Reviews of Jacob's book can be found at Amazon:
http://www.*-*-*.com/

The CEUG Open Source Project is located on SourceForge:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ceug/



Sun, 18 Sep 2005 03:47:32 GMT  
 
 [ 1 post ] 

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