Proportional font: Unlike most programming languages, Eiffel is not normally displayed in a monospaced typeface. The recommended display style is to use a proportional typeface. Keywords are displayed in bold, user-defined identifiers and constants are displayed in italics. Standard upright (roman) style is used for comments, operators, and punctuation marks. This is essentially the same concept as syntax coloring which has become very popular in IDEs for many languages, except that Eiffel's recommendations also extend to print media.I tried to follow these rules to write a little style for SyntaxHighlighter (I'll put them online as soon as possible to properly format our sources here). I would like to know your opinion about it; also please feel free to partecipate!
My personal opinion is that this stylistical rule is deeply yet unconsciously linked to Literate Programming since valid Eiffel source code often resemble a natural language like English, at least much more than C, C++, Python, Java and so on.
Actually an Eiffel program is not "written as an uninterrupted exposition of logic in an ordinary human language", yet the source code of an Eiffel class, with its emphasis on documentation, the preconditions, the postconditions and its invariant strikingly resemble an explanation in a natural language, such as English, of the design of the type it represent.
Eiffel source code looks so much like the pseudocode typically used in teaching computer science to explain algorithms that when Bertrand Meyer wrote Object Oriented Software Construction he actually used Eiffel from page one without telling it to his reader, pretending it was pseudocode; in the pages of the book it justified each and every design choice of his design then in the epilogue he actually revealed that the pseudo-code he used wasn't actually pseudo-code at all but real, effective Eiffel code.
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