Lambda the Ultimate

Bertrand Meyer ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Zürich, Switzerland

July 2002

Summary: Describes the implementation and integration of the full power of the Eiffel language and method, including Design by Contract, multiple inheritance, genericity, and other advanced facilities, into the Microsoft .NET Framework, creating an environment that provides a best-of-breed solution for ambitious Internet software developers. (27 printed pages)

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dndotnet/html/pdc_eiffel.asp

There was a topic on compilation of Eiffel to the CLR a time ago: Compiling Eiffel for the CLR. I posted a comment over there regarding the implementation of multiple inheritance:

I've not tried it out, but as far as I can see the multiple-inheritance work-around with interfaces doesn't work if one (or more) superclass has not been not written in Eiffel (C# for example) or the class is compiled in IL .

The Eiffel .NET compiler cannot make an interface and make this superclass implement this interface. Thus it is impossible to use the work-around in this case. I haven't tried it out although, so I might miss something essential.

If this is correct, the integration of Eiffel is not as good as Bertrand tries to show in this article. This is not a big deal te me, but I'm disappointed (again: the first article did also contain some incorrect statements) that a man like Bertrand Meyer doesn't present the full picture.

Back to now: I've read the multiple inheritance section in this article, but again there is no mention of this problem. Am I completely wrong (please correct me in this case!) or is Bertrand Meyer again not presenting the complete picture?