Eiffel The Language
Setting It All Up
Getting Started
Design and Documentation
Miscellaneous
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Eiffel The Language
Setting It All Up
Getting Started
Design and Documentation
Miscellaneous
There is much to do in the first week of EECS3311. Get started right away. Familiarize yourself with Eiffel, the Eiffel method, and Eiffelstudio:
Ensure that you understand and can do the following:
Whenever you want to get started with a new language (in our case Eiffel) or an Integrated Development Environment (in our case, EiffelStudio), one always tries to run the simplest possible program - one that prints out “Hello World”.
In Java you need
In Eiffel you also need
hello_world.e
file with the Eiffel code as well as Here are the contents of hello_world.e:
class HELLO_WORLD create make feature make do print("Hi World!") end end
To compile your program from the command line, use
ec18.11 hello_world.e
On Prism (Linux), we have renamed the command line compiler (“ec”) to '“ec18.11”, as we are using EiffelStudio version 18.11.
[On your own install in Linux/Windows/MacOs, you may be prompted to precompile. Answer Yes.]
On Windows/MacOs, the command line will just be “ec”. On Windows, use the EiffelStudio 18.11 Command Prompt (available from the Start menu).
When you invoke ec on a single source file such as hello_world.e, the compiler will generate the ecf file for you (hello_world.ecf). ECF files specify which libraries will be used. The Base library is always included.
To execute the program:
cd EIFGENs/hello_world/W_code ./hello_world
You can obtain a finalized executable that can be deployed by any user (without the need for the EiffelStudio environment) by:
ec18.11 -c_compile -finalize -config hello_world.ecf
The Eiffel program is translated to C, and the C program is compiled to executable machine code (that does not need a virtual machine to run it). To execute the program:
cd EIFGENs/hello_world/F_code ./hello_world
The above executable should print out “Hi world”. This executable is all you need to run the program on any other Linux machine of the same architecture.
You can invoke the EiffelStudio IDE on the above project as follows:
> estudio18.11 &
(On your own install, it is just estudio).
When you start a new project on the IDE, you can use the Wizard to generate an ECF file automatically. If you already have a project with ECF file foo.ecf, then you can start from the command line as follows:
estudio18.11 foo.ecf &.
(The ampersand at the end causes the EStudio process to run in the background, leaving the terminal free for further commands.)
The compiler creates a large number of C and other files that you should get rid off to conserve disk space.
We recommend that you reserve 200MB of free space on your disk for generating the intermediate C files.
If you invoke the Linux command eclean on your directory, the EIFGENs (Eiffel generated files) will be deleted leaving only *.e and *.ecf files.
> eclean .