Sather

language /Say-ther/ (Named after the Sather Tower at UCB,

as opposed to the Eiffel Tower).

An interactive object-oriented language designed by Steve

M. Omohundro at ICSI in 1991. Sather has simple syntax,

similar to Eiffel, but it is non-proprietary and faster.

Sather 0.2 was nearly a subset of Eiffel 2.0, but Sather 1.0

adds many distinctive features: parameterised classes,

multiple inheritance, statically-checked strong typing,

garbage collection. The compiler generates C as an

intermediate language. There are versions for most

workstations.

Sather attempts to retain much of Eiffel's theoretical

cleanliness and simplicity while achieving the efficiency of

C++. The compiler generates efficient and portable C code

which is easily integrated with existing code.

A variety of development tools including a debugger and

browser based on gdb and a GNU Emacs development

environment have also been written. There is also a classlibrary with several hundred classes that implement a variety

of basic data structures and numerical, geometric,

connectionist, statistical, and graphical abstractions. The

authors would like to encourage contributions to the library

and hope to build a large collection of efficient,

well-written, well-tested classes in a variety of areas of

computer science.

Sather runs on Sun-4, HP9000/300, Decstation 5000,

MIPS, Sony News 3000, Sequent/Dynix, SCO SysVR3.2,

NeXT, Linux.

See also dpSather, pSather, Sather-K.

.

E-mail: [email protected].

Mailing list: [email protected].

(1995-04-26)