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Eiffel Software announced today the release of EiffelStudio 6.4, the latest version of its award-winning Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
This important release makes Eiffel the first major language to include “Void Safety”, a mechanism that entirely removes the risk of applications crashing because of “null pointer dereferencing”. World-famous computer scientist and Turing Award winner C.A.R. Hoare recently called this problem the “Billion-Dollar Mistake”. Thanks to Void Safety, Eiffel programmers are the only ones in the industry to be freed from this threat to the reliability of their applications. “With the increasing complexity of the applications they develop today, programmers need tools that protect against errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes,” said Emmanuel Stapf, Senior Software Developer with Eiffel Software. “With Void Safety, we are proud to bring added power and protection to our users in EiffelStudio 6.4.”
Other new features in EiffelStudio 6.4 include:
• AutoTest: support for completely automatic testing, another first in the industry; Taking advantage of Eiffel’s unique Design by Contract™ mechanism, AutoTest automatically generates program tests, without any need for programmers to write test cases or test oracles.
• Support for new constructs of the International Standards Organization (ISO) standard for the Eiffel programming language, bringing standards coverage to over 95%.
• Eiffel Information System: automatic linking of program texts with documentation (HTML, Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF): click on program text to see corresponding documentation, and on the documentation to see the corresponding program elements.
• Support for the iPhone platform. Extended completion mechanism, facilitating developers’ work.
• Considerable speed improvements (up to 20%) in compilation time.
Details on these and other new features of EiffelStudio 6.4 are listed on the company's website.
The list of major platforms that EiffelStudio supports is growing. Portability has always been one of the strengths of EiffelStudio; this new release continues the tradition with the availability of EiffelStudio on the iPhone. A partial list of platforms includes:
• Windows Classic, .NET, and 64-bit;
• Linux, Linux PPC and 64-bit;
• FreeBSD and 64-bit;
• Solaris 10 on Sparc, Sparc-64, x86 and x86-64;
• SGI Irix and 64-bit;
• VMS;
• Embedded platforms;
• iPhone.
“EiffelStudio 6.4 is a major release that brings lots of new features to the software community as well as additional software security — and it’s now available on the iPhone,” said Larry Miller, Director of Business Development at Eiffel Software. “EiffelStudio 6.4 is the only IDE that offers all the major features necessary to guarantee the development of correct and safe applications, such as Design by Contract™, multiple inheritance, genericity, automatic testing, Void Safety …. EiffelStudio is the best IDE for companies that want the most return on their IT investment.”
EiffelStudio is based on the widely acclaimed Eiffel programming language, the most extensive implementation of object-oriented concepts, standardized through ECMA and the International Standards Organization. Its core concepts, native only to Eiffel, such as Design by Contract™, multiple inheritance, genericity, conversions and agents allow developers to write high quality applications that are easy to maintain. Eiffel, which received the prestigious ACM Software Systems Award, is used by developers and design-team leaders in challenging enterprise environments in the financial, insurance, manufacturing, health, and government sectors as well as by independent development teams.
A full-feature evaluation edition is available from the Eiffel Software web site enabling developers to experience the full power of the environment before purchasing it.
About Eiffel Software
Eiffel software (eiffel.com) was founded in 1985 with the mission of developing compilers and tools based on the power of pure object-oriented concepts to improve programmers' productivity, lifecycle efficiency and quality of the resulting applications. For close to twenty-five years Eiffel Software has delivered to its customer base the most cost-effective and advanced development tools on a large variety of platforms.
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caroline[.]eiffel.com 
