ISE Base to SmallEiffel Port

Introduction

On August 4th, 1998 ISE released the Eiffel Base library as Open Source. This page contains information about the effort of making this library work with the SmallEiffel compiler.

10/19/98
- Added a more extended tests for LINKED_LISTs.
- I have a bug in my changes to ARRAYED_LIST. The test crashes and I haven't had time to debug it. The ISE class has a weird inheritance clause that had to be changed a lot just to compile with SmallEiffel.
- Started a test class for sets. No real code in it yet.
8/22/98
- The code for the ISE library now contains the proper copyright statements. The official version of ISE code can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.eiffel.com/pub/shelf/ise/eiffelbase/base-1998-08.zip.
- I revamped the test directory to make compiling of tests easier.
- I started to use SmallEiffel -0.79 (beta2), which fixes the problems I experienced with compiling LINKED_LIST class and the "is_equal" bug.
8/4/98
The first version of the library put up. Couple of test programs written.

To install just unpack the tar files into the same directory. There will be a "base" and a "tests" directory. Try compiling the programs in "tests".

Differences between ISE's compiler and SmallEiffel
- ISE short-circuits evaluation of booleans expressions, SmallEiffel does not.
- ISE creates a new string each time a string constant is assigned to a variable, SmallEiffel reuses the string. The equivalent code in ISE and SmallEiffel is:
  
  ISE SmallEiffel
  
  s := "foo" s := clone ("foo")
- Name conflicts - ISE base has a class called COLLECTION and so does SmallEiffel Kernel. For now I renamed ISE's COLLECTION to ISE_COLLECTION.
- Case of names. SmallEiffel wants variables and constants to be in lower case. ISE starts constants with upper case letters (eg. "Maximum").
Problems with SmallEiffel
- "is_equal" doesn't work right. "a.is_equal (b)" doesn't compile if "b" is a subtype of "a".
  I have received a fix for this from Dominque Colnet. The fix will be in the next release of SmallEiffel (fixed in -0.79 beta2).
- SmallEiffel -0.80 crashes when it compiles a test with a call to LINKED_LIST "extend" routine (fixed in -0.79 beta2).

Please help! If you writes new tests, make changes to the base library please send it to me and I'll integrate it into a newer version.

Last modified: Mon Oct 19 22:17:32 EDT 1998

ISE	SmallEiffel
s := "foo"	s := clone ("foo")