The people behind Eiffel 

Philippe Stephan

Philippe Stephan worked at ISE from March 1989 to November 1992.

He started working on indexing the Eiffel version 2.1 troff documentation, using a DT100 screen hooked to a more senior ISE employee's machine.

He then spent several months cleaning up the basic data structure Eiffel library (soon to be renamed EiffelBase) to enforce naming consistency, on a Sun 386i.

Philippe then worked on the Cepage structured editor. He revamped its Earley parsing algorithm and, in team with Fred Dernbach, ended up redesigning the whole system, later renamed ArchiText: a grammar-sensitive stuctured editor, entirely written in Eiffel. A Data General Aviion enabled him to do the job. A side effect of the task was a revamp of the graphical library, now called EiffelVision.

He was then promoted to leader of the ISE technical team and managed the Eiffel 3 development effort, enabling him to quit programming in C altogether to be 100% pure Eiffel, while retaining the right to design and implement the user interface. He was by then using one of the early SparcStations.

Philippe then went back to France, and worked on a PC in Pascal in the option trading department of bank Société Générale in Paris.

He quickly moved to helping start up the company that would become Credit Agricole Lazard Financial Product (CALFP), a joint venture between the world-top-10 bank Credit Agricole and the famous investment bank Lazard Freres.

As of July 1997, he is working as CALFP Head of systems, works on a beefed-up Ultra 2 Sparc Station, manages the 700,000+ lines of Eiffel code which make the Rainbow in-house front-to-back office derivative system on which the bank relies for all its operation.

Philippe thinks that the most important thing for Eiffel's success is a fast and portable development environment, with dynamic linking at runtime.

To other people pages.