The language Eiffel has been designed with a clear concern for correctness and validation. It supports a bottom-up development approach, centered around the design of robust classes. Along with the language, [Meyer88] introduces the notion of contracts as a means to specify the mutual obligations between the user of an object and the object in terms of a client/server relation.

Eiffel -- a language with assertions

-- class design

contracts -- specify client/server relationships

Design principles -- correctness

static typing -- type secure
multiple inheritance -- polymorphism
dynamic binding -- refinement
generic classes -- abstraction

slide: The language Eiffel

Eiffel is a (type secure) statically typed language, providing multiple inheritance and generic classes. Recently, Eiffel-3 has been introduced, supporting a number of features (such as overloading) inspired by C++. See [Eiffel3].