The Eiffel programming language was conceived in the 1980s by Dr Bertrand Meyer. It is an advanced object-oriented language designed to maximize software correctness and reuse. It is elegant, economical and built on a sound theoretical base.
Dr Meyer wrote a book, 'Object oriented Software Construction' which many regard as the most readable and compelling discussion of modern software engineering. He formed a company in California, 'Interactive Software Engineering', to build a compiler and use it for commercial software applications.
Following extensive discussion with the growing numbers of Eiffel enthusiasts world-wide, Dr Meyer revised and developed the language. He described version 3 in a new book 'Eiffel: The Language'.
The Eiffel community, conscious of the importance of commercial acceptance and the risk of being dismissed as 'academic' or 'proprietary', formed an international non-profit consortium (NICE) to foster the next period of the language's growth. The consortium is the sole authority for the language definition.
More vendors entered the market: Object Tools (formerly SiG Computer) and Halstenbach in Germany, Tower Technology in Texas and the SmallEiffel project. Compilers are available for a variety of platforms, including DOS and Windows PCs.
The network news group 'comp.lang.eiffel' is a lively forum for informed debate.
An online journal is being established, known as Eiffel Liberty.
Eiffel has a close connection with an international conference series, TOOLS. Three conferences are held each year, in the United States, Europe and the Pacific.
World Wide Web pages are maintained for Eiffel in general, Tower Technologies and Interactive Software Engineering and Object Tools.