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Friday
Dec102004

Bertrand Meyer's Word Games in OOSC2

In his magnum opus, Object Oriented Software Construction (2nd Edition), Bertrand Meyer refrains from explicitly mentioning 'Eiffel', the name of the programming language he is expounding, until the very end of the Epilogue.  However, it is fairly well known within the Eiffel community that 'EIFFEL' is encoded in the first letters of the text of chapters 1 to 6.  Well, that is not the end of Meyer's word games.  After a little research, I have discovered the following:

The first letters of each of the 36 chapters are, in order:

EIFFELEIFFELEIFFELEIFFELEIFFELEEIFEL
That is, five EIFFEL's followed by an EEIFEL.  Presumably chapters 32-33 have been changed since the first edition.  Maybe someone could check this out for me?

Following chapter 36 there is a two-page epilogue entitled:
Epilogue, In Full Frankness Exposing the Language
The first letters of this, ignoring the 'the', spell out EIFFEL.

The epilogue also consists of six paragraphs, the first letters of which spell out (yes you've guessed it) EIFFEL.

 

Reader Comments (2)

Off Topic:

but have look at :

http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

The Free Lunch Is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software
2004-12-25 | Unregistered CommenterGavin
Nice Family tree of Programming Languages here:

http://www.levenez.com/lang/history.html
2005-02-03 | Unregistered CommenterGavin

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