NICE - report of Paris meeting
Rick Jones
Non-profit International Consortium for Eiffel
(NICE)
First meeting of members, 11th March 1991
The first official meeting of NICE, the Non-profit International Consortium for
Eiffel, took place in Paris on Friday, 11th March 1991. It was a small and
friendly meeting, involving representatives from Interactive Software
Engineering, Tetra Ltd, Enea Data, as well as Dr. Bertrand Meyer. This is not
the total membership of the consortium, which at the current time also includes
BNR (Canada), and Telecom Australia; however, these companies were not
represented at the Paris meeting.
Several key issues were agreed by the members present, and a number of actions
tabled for urgent work. These included agreeing to accept the book "Eiffel:
the Language (version 3)" as the definitive starting point for the language.
The book is currently in final draft, but is expected to be ready for
publication in a matter of weeks. ISE also agreed to transfer the ownership of
the trademark "Eiffel" to NICE with immediate effect, thereby confirming the
commitment to establish Eiffel as a non-proprietary language.
The meeting agreed to accept Bertrand Meyer as a lifetime honorary charter
member, in recognition of his work in designing Eiffel and promoting the entire
philosophy of software construction which Eiffel embodies. In this capacity he
represents himself, not Interactive Software Engineering, his company. ISE is
itself represented, and has an honorary membership only for a limited period.
This is to compensate for both the costs of launching the consortium, and the
transfer of rights to the trademark "Eiffel" and various other copyrights. It
would be easy to be cynical, and believe that NICE is just a promotional
exercise on the part of ISE. I can state categorically that it is not, that
neither Dr. Meyer nor ISE have any special priveleges outside honorary
membership, and that the other members are committed to ensuring that NICE is
both independent and fair.
On technical issues, a committee was established to examine the problems of
interfaces between Eiffel and other languages, e.g. "C". This was as a direct
result of matters raised during the Eiffel User Group meeting only a few hours
earlier, during which it became clear that the C language interface defined in
the current definition of Eiffel is not sufficiently detailed for large-scale
software projects. With the imminent prospect of other implementations of
Eiffel becoming available, the members of NICE appreciated the urgent need to
define an interface to C which is usable for major software projects, portable
between implementations, and which does not hinder technical innovation in the
development of Eiffel compilers. The technical committee will consult with all
interested parties, especially those developing compilers, before making a
final recommendation.
Further technical work of a high priority was agreed to be the definition of an
external portable object format, allowing the interchange of object structures
between different platforms and implementations.
The meeting also agreed on the need to have some form of validation suite in
order to be able to certify implementations of Eiffel. This will be solicited
via some form of tendering process, since it will be more effective to buy-in
the required technology. A more specific invitation to tender will be
published in due course; the principle reason for the delay is that the
validation suite will need to test conformance to Eiffel version 3, and the
definitive book for that version is not yet published.
The constitution of NICE prevented the formal election of a board and officers,
since not all members were represented. This will be completed over the next
few weeks via post or electronic mail. To enable the consortium's work to
continue, temporary acting appointments of Chairman and Treasurer were made.
NICE is an independent organisation, and is determined to be an active and
effective one. Although the consortium was created by ISE, it does not
represent their interests and now operates independently. This is illustrated
by the technical committee on C interfaces, which will not favour details of
ISE's implementation over anyone else's. NICE will consult as widely as
possible with the Eiffel user community over many issues, especially technical
ones. The principle vehicles for announcements from NICE will be the Eiffel
User Group newsletter, the independent newsletter Eiffel Outlook, and the
USENET newsgroup comp.lang.eiffel. If you use Eiffel, you will want to know
what is happening in NICE, and we are always interested in your views and other
feedback. If you are serious about Eiffel, either as a committed user
organisation, or as a developer of Eiffel compilers, tools, or libraries, you
should consider joining the consortium. This will not only give you much
closer insight into what is happening with Eiffel, but will also enable you to
have a significant influence in shaping the future direction of the language.
I believe that 1991 may well be a watershed for Eiffel, with the much-improved
version 3 language definition, competitive implementations across different
platforms, and an increasing awareness of the language's ability to deal
effectively with difficult problems in object-oriented design and programming.
In the midst of this, NICE has the responsibility to act as an independent
reference over what can be claimed to be Eiffel, as well as defining
progressive enhancements through a consultative process.
The computer business of the 1990s is acutely aware of the need not only for
standards, but for standards which do not stifle competition or true technical
progress. Many "standards" are in fact proprietary, de-facto standards which
give little scope for development by other than one company. The true de-jure
public standards have often been the result of painful pulling-together of
disparate threads, involving protracted arguments, and frequently resulting in
less than ideal compromises. NICE is perhaps unique in this context, being a
body with no commercial allegiance, and with the goal of building an evolving
public standard before any divergence takes place. The result could be one of
the most powerful, portable, and usable programming systems in the history of
computing. That is my commitment to NICE.
Rick Jones
Acting Chairman
If you are interested in joining NICE, or would like to express any opinion
about or relevant to the consortium, contact:
Darcy Harrison Rick Jones
Interactive Software Engineering Inc Tetra Ltd
270 Storke Rd, Suite 18 Cynosure Centre
Goleta Vanwall Business Park
CA 93117, USA Maidenhead, Berks
Tel: +1 805 685-1006 SL6 4UB, England
Email: dar...@eiffel.com Tel: +44 628 776677
Email: ri...@tetrauk.uucp
--
Rick Jones, Tetra Ltd. Maidenhead, Berks, UK
ri...@tetrauk.uucp
Any fool can provide a solution - the problem is to understand the problem