Editing Eiffel (programming language) (section)

===Interfaces to other tools and languages===
Eiffel is a purely object-oriented language but provides an [[open architecture]] for interfacing with "external" software in any other programming language.

It is possible for example to program machine- and operating-system level operations in [[C (programming language)|C]]. Eiffel provides a straightforward interface to C routines, including support for "inline C" (writing the body of an Eiffel routine in C, typically for short machine-level operations).

There is no direct connection between Eiffel and C. However, many Eiffel [[compiler]]s ([[Visual Eiffel]] is one exception) emit C [[source code]] as an [[intermediate language]], to submit to a C compiler, for [[Optimization (computer science)|optimizing]] or [[porting]]. As such, they are examples of [[transcompiler]]s. The Eiffel Compiler tecomp can execute Eiffel code directly (like an interpreter) without going via an intermediate C code or emit C code which will be passed to a C compiler to obtain optimized native code. On [[.NET]], the [[EiffelStudio]] compiler directly generates [[Common Intermediate Language]] (CIL) code. The [[SmartEiffel]] compiler can also emit [[Java bytecode]].