EiffelBase
The ultimate in reusability
EiffelBase is one of the principal contributions of Eiffel: a library of fundamental structures and algorithms
covering the basics of computing, and resulting from a "Linnaean" effort at a general-purpose taxonomy
of computing structures. EiffelBase is one of the most carefully designed and extensively used libraries in the
object-oriented industry.
The library and its design principles are described in detail in the book "Reusable
Software: The Base Object-Oriented Component Libraries".
Kernel
The Kernel library covers the most common needs:
- Universal classes providing facilities potentially useful for all classes: ANY and GENERAL. Every class is
a descendant of these classes.
- Fine control of the exception handling mechanism.
- Arrays and strings.
- Elements on which standard arithmetic operations are available.
- Hashable elements, for use with hash tables.
- Basic arithmetic conversions.
Fundamental structures and algorithms
- Abstract structures, describing broad categories
- Lists in their various forms
- List elements
- Circular chains
- Sets and lists kept sorted
- Various trees and binary trees
- Cursor trees
- Hash tables (dictionaries)
- Dispensers: stacks, queues, priority queues
EiffelBase Basic Libraries
- Support Library
- The Support Library provides a number of classes that extend the language and environment facilities, enabling
programmers to develop advanced uses of Eiffel: class STORABLE provides a way to produce a logical image of an
entire data structure in a file; class MEMORY for fine tuning of the memory management mechanism; and more.
- Data Structure Library
- The Data Structure Library provides implementations of fundamental data structures and algorithms: Abstract
structures, describing broad categories; lists in their various forms; list elements; circular chains; sorted sets
and lists; various trees and binary trees; cursor trees; hash tables (dictionaries); various stacks, queues and
priority queues; and more.
- Iterations Library
- The Iterations Library provides high-level templates that avoid using control structures such as loops and
facilitates writing features so that control structures are more easily modified in descendant classes.
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