Sather

/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 class library 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.