Overview Exercises 1.1 Here is a brief summary of the features and historical relationships among Eiffel, Perl, and Python: (a) “The Eiffel Development FrameworkTM is a complete software development system, consisting of three major components: the Eiffel methodology for creating robust, efficient, and scalable objectoriented software; Eiffel, the programming language and compiler that support and enforce the methodology; and EiffelStudioTM, a seamless, object-oriented software development environment designed for demanding enterprise applications.” (from www.eiffel.com) Eiffel is a proprietary language, so its usage is not free. Eiffel’s historical relationships are identified in Figure 1.2: it is an object-oriented derivative of Smalltalk, originally invented by Bertrand Meyer in the late 1980s. (b) “Perl takes the best features from other languages, such as C, awk, sed, sh, and BASIC, among others. Its database integration interface (DBI) supports third-party databases including Oracle, Sybase, Postgres, MySQL and others. It also works with HTML, XML, and other mark-up languages. Perl supports Unicode, as well as both procedural and object-oriented programming. Perl interfaces with external C/C++ libraries through XS or SWIG. There are over 500 third party modules available from the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN).” (www.perl.org). Perl’s historical relationships are identified in Figure 1.2: it is an open source language, originally invented by Larry Wall in the late 1980s. (c) “Python is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that can be used for many kinds of software development. It offers strong support for integration with other languages and tools, comes with