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
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.
See also
dpSather,
pSather,
Sather-K.
(ftp://ftp.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/sather).
E-mail:
.
Mailing list: sather-request@icsi.berkeley.edu.
(1995-04-26)