Extract from Preface to "Object-Oriented Programming In Eiffel"
                  by Pete Thomas and Ray Weedon

Eiffel is a programming language designed to encourage the
construction of correct software componenets using the object-oriented
approach.  It is named after the French Engineer who built the 
amazing tower in Paris.  In the same way that M. Eiffel was an 
excellent civil engineer, Eiffel the language is a tool for building
software utilizing excellent software engineering techniques.

. . .

To say that Eiffel is a programming language specifically designed to
support the object-oriented paradigm is true but misses a major part
of the story.  Eiffel has been designed to support modern software
engineering techniques.  It brings together two important strands of
thinking to prvide software engineers with a powerful yet easy-to-use
tool.

The main driving force behind the design of Eiffel was the desire to 
produce a programming language that would facillitate and encourage the
construction of correct software.  Object-oriented programming is a
natural step in this direction because it is an attempt to narrow the
gap between what a piece of software, a software component, is to
acheive (defined in a specification) and how the program code (the
implementation) is to achieve it.  An object-oriented program contains
descriptions of objects which are models of their real-world
counterparts.  By analysing a problem in terms of objects and then
modelling them in software makes the resulting program easier to
understand and hence easier to maintain, that is, the object approach
makes it easier to produce correct programs.

Another important technique in the production of correct software is
to make as much use of existing software (known to be correct) in
the construction of new applications.  Eiffel has been designed to
exploit software component reuse and one of the key mechanisms
facilitating this is known as inheritance, a concept that
characterizes all object-oriented languages.