| 36 | 39 | * the ability to bind properly to the two "big" languages around today, namely C# and Java. It is worth considering that we are now in an IT environment somewhat like the CORBA/COM situation of a decade ago. Many companies and other organisations promised that the two would talk together; they never did, properly. Similarly, there are political reasons why companies (particularly Sun and Microsoft) are unlikely to make it easy for developers to jump to the other side, or integrate software written in the two languages properly. Eiffel does offer one solution to this problem. Tools have already been built by ISE which compile Eiffel code to native .Net bytecode, meaning that Eiffel components can be deployed seamlessly with components written in other .Net languages. Eiffel has also be wrapped for Java in production software in health, and can be reliably deployed in Java environments. The upshot of this is that a single code base for an important component could be written in Eiffel and deployed on all platforms, not just in one or other of the .Net or Java worlds. |
