Welcome to the Fine webpage.
Fine is a variation of the
Eiffel programming language. Eiffel is the best programming
language I have used, but it has a few minor things that I think
might work better, in some environments such as real-time or
embedded systems, if they were different. Fine is an experiment
to try some different things and see how they work.
This compiler
is based upon the SmallEiffel compiler created at the Loria in France
and is freely available from
http://smalleiffel.loria.fr/
These are some of my ideas that I would like to try in Fine, and
also some ideas that have been suggested on the SmallEiffel mailing
list:
- Have reference classes contain a mutable/immutable attribute so
classes can be made "write protected" and cannot be changed
unless the lock holder releases it.
- Various sized integers and unsigned integers. I have created
a web page
describing how I would like to implement various types of numbers
in Fine.
- Change the bit ordering of the BIT N class from left-to-right to
right-to-left such that bit 0 is the least significant bit.
Having the bits numbered with 1 being the most significant bit
just makes my head hurt.
- Call the single precision floating point class FLOAT instead of
Real.
- A simpler way of interfacing to "C" and "C++". I have done quite
a bit of interfacing SmallEiffel to "C" and "C++" and even with
the external "C" and cecil stuff, it's still a pain.
Note: I have
not tried the new "C++" interface in SmallEiffel, and it may
have already solved this problem. If not then
one idea is to add an interface
or wrapper class, that allows access to C defines, structures,
and C++ classes.
- Have a size limit on memory, so the garbage collector will kick
in earlier.
- Multi-threading. Need to look into the Z-threads.
- Making expanded local variables automatic (allocated on the
stack).
- Inlining functions in C, for speed improvement.
Links:
If you have problems, comments, etc. please contact me at
sedwards@qrwsoftware.com or visit my web page at
http://www.qrwsoftware.com.
Updated: 27-Feb-2002
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