Conformance of agents in the Eiffel language

In Eiffel, the notion of agent makes it possible to describe and manipulate computation parts (i.e. operations) like ordinary data. Operations may be partially described, may be passed as ordinary data and may have their execution delayed. Agents are very convenient for many purposes, such as going through data structures and implementing call-backs in graphical libraries. Although they can be seen as normal objects, they convey specific issues, pertaining to standard conformance rules for generic types. To get rid of existing problems, this paper proposes an adaptation of conformance rules for agents that provides much more flexibility while retaining all the benefits of a strong static typing system.