Home | About | Partners | Contact Us
VA Linux Systems

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

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are properties of their respective owners. Forum comments are owned by the poster. The rest is copyright ©1999-2000 VA Linux Systems, Inc.