First Steps

Hello.e

Once Sofa is installed and you have rebooted (to enable the new Workbench search path), start your editor and create a file hello.e with the following content:

class HELLO

creation make

feature
   make is
   do
      print("hello.%N")
   end

end -- class HELLO

To compile it, open a CLI and type

compile hello

Then you might have to wait for quite some while. Eventually, you should end up with a program hello that, when invoked, displays the text "hello.".

If not, request support.

If so, congratulations, you just created a debugging version of hello. To get rid of all the junk files the compiler created, type

clean hello

To create an optimised version without the garbage collector (GC), type

compile -boost -no_gc hello

This reduces the size of the executable from about 50K to about 14K, which should be quite acceptable. I mention this just because early Eiffel compilers created 2MB hello programs, and some people still have this misconception in their mind.

What next?

You can find some more plain Eiffel examples in the sofa:SmallEiffel/lib_show directory. For Amiga specific stuff, take a look at the sofa library.

If you take a look at the questions & answers section, you will find lots of interesting pointers and solutions to common problems.