What: SATHER
Sather is under development at the International Computer Science Institute. Sather has clean and simple syntax, parameterized classes, object-oriented dispatch, multiple inheritance, strong typing, and garbage collection. The compiler generates efficient and portable C code which is easily integrated with existing code.
The initial beta test release of the language was in May, 1991. The compiler, debugger, Emacs development environment, documentation, and library classes are available by anonymous ftp from "icsi-ftp.berkeley.edu". "sather@icsi.berkeley.edu" is a mailing list for discussing aspects of Sather and "sather-admin@icsi.berkeley.edu" should be used for bug reports and requests to be added or deleted from the mailing list.
Sather is based on Eiffel but is more concerned with efficiency and less with some of the formal and theoretical issues addressed by Eiffel. The language is much smaller than the current Eiffel, it eliminates over 40 keywords and simplifies the syntax and inheritance rules.
Like Eiffel, Sather code is compiled into portable C and efficiently links with existing C code. The Sather compiler is written in Sather and has been operational for almost a year, though it is still being improved. Preliminary benchmarks show a performance improvement over Eiffel of between a factor of 4 and 50 on basic dispatching and function calls. On the benchmarks used at Stanford to test Self (including 8 queens, towers of hanoi, bubblesort, etc), Sather is even slightly faster than C++.
The Sather compiler and libraries are publicly available under a very unrestrictive license aimed at encouraging contribution to the public library without precluding the use of Sather for proprietary projects. The goal is to establish a repository for efficient, reusable, well written, publicly available, classes for most of the important algorithms in computer science. There are currently about 120 classes in the library. The libraries are growing quickly and will collect together classes from many authors under the same unrestrictive license.
A GNU emacs development environment for Sather is available. A debugger based on gdb from the Free Software Foundation is also available. A parallel version of Sather for shared memory machines called "Psather" is also under development.
From the Sather FAQ, August 16, 1993 (See Section 1.24):
Q 1: What is Sather?
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Sather is an object oriented language which aims to be simple,
efficient, interactive, safe, and non-proprietary. It aims to meet the
needs of modern research groups and to foster the development of a
large, freely available, high-quality library of efficient
well-written classes for a wide variety of computational tasks. It was
originally based on Eiffel but now incorporates ideas and approaches
from several languages. One way of placing it in the "space of
languages" is to say that it attempts to be as efficient as C, C++, or
Fortran, as elegant and safe as Eiffel or CLU, and to support
interactive programming and higher-order functions as well as Common
Lisp, Scheme, or Smalltalk.
Sather has garbage collection, statically-checked strong typing, multiple inheritance, separate implementation and type inheritance, parameterized classes, dynamic dispatch, iteration abstraction, higher-order routines and iters, exception handling, assertions, preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants. The development environment integrates an interpreter, a debugger, and a compiler. Sather code can be compiled into C code and can efficiently link with C object files.
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