Team Eiffel

Whilst I was writing yesterday's article about Eiffel and C++ compared, I recalled some of the spirited exchanges of the late 1980s and 1990s between Bertrand Meyer and the proponents of languages from the C family. I found some old quotes that I had collected, and had posted to comp.lang.eiffel in 1998.

I've copied all of them to a page of their own, Quotes, mostly about Eiffel, where I will add new quotes as I come across them.

Here are some of the ones that relate directly to Eiffel versus other languages:

I do not think that in the long term Eiffel is really "competing" with C++. They have almost nothing in common in their aim and spirit. In my undoubtedly biased view, the real competitor to Eiffel is Ada.
-- Bertrand Meyer, 1989

You can have quality software, or you can have pointer arithmetic; but you cannot have both at the same time.
-- Bertrand Meyer, 1989

As for our grandchildren, only the paleontology professors among them will know what C++ was
-- Bertrand Meyer, 1990

Eiffel borrows quite openly from several earlier programming languages and I am sure that if we had found a good language construct in C we would have used it as well.
-- Bertrand Meyer, 1992

The belief is still widespread in the computing community that C and its derivatives are programming languages - languages intended for people to write programs in. This is a regrettable misunderstanding ... I wish Dennis Ritchie would come out and dispel the confusion once and for all.
-- Bertrand Meyer, JOOP July/August 1998