[Grace-core] Eiffel features

[James Noble]

> In preparation for Monday's lecture in programming languages, I took a look at the Eiffel description in Wikipedia:
> 	http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_(programming_language)

yep... there is good stuff in Eiffel...

> There are interesting sections on tuples and "agents".  Agents are their weight of introducing closures -- wrapping 
> operations to be passed as parameters, which are then called with a list of arguments.  

yep

> Thus if a is an agent then a.call(args) invokes a on the list of elements in args.  An advantage of this notation is you don't need to  have an overloaded apply with all possible size tuples of arguments.

Hmm, but later on the wiki article says:

> The current agent mechanism leaves a possibility of run-time type error (if a routine with n arguments is passed to an agent expecting marguments with m < n).

Eiffel always had a bigger problem than covariance,,

> They also seem to have reasonable notation for creating operators as aliases of methods names.


a (? , ?) ? 

cheers

J