From Calls to Agents

Of the recent Eiffel extensions previewed in the last column (Extension Season, June 1999, see http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/meyer/publications/joop/extensions.pdf), some are intended to clean up and simplify existing mechanisms, but a few significantly raise the expressive power of the language. The most spectacular of these is agents, a new mechanism for manipulating operations as objects — so important on its own that it deserves a presentation of its own.