Discussion

System Architecture

Page System Architecture states: “The system is the software resulting from the compilation of classes contained in one universe.”

IMHO, software is not the only result of a compilation. Equally important would be a compiler generated documentation of the system’s component’s (clusters, classes, types?, what else)

(cadrian) – the “System” definition is the classic Eiffel definition. It is centered on making a working executable.

On the other hand, I agree with you, documentation is an important software artefact, but its not “executable” so it has nothing to do with the “System” as defined.

Maybe we need to find another word that covers all the produced artefacts: executable, documents, and so on.

Also note that documents generated from the code are not the only kind of useful documents. Some hand-written documents may be important too, as long as they are not redundant with the code (hence obsolete).

(remys) I went back to my classics (OOSC2) and can agree with you. Otoh, the software construction process matters to me almost as much as the compilation of a system. So comes the question about tools. Compiler is the tool to build/compile a system, but then we need more tools to support the construction process. Would these be part of the Liberty project and its libraries?

(cadrian) Definitely, yes. We need to have tools equivalent to (at least) SmartEiffel’s tools suite: eiffeldoc, short, class_check, eiffeltest, pretty, find…