History

Sather - A Language Tutorial
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# 1.6. History

Sather is still growing rapidly. The initial Sather compiler (for 'Version 0' of the language) was written in Sather (bootstrapped by hand-translating to C) over the summer of 1990. ICSI made the language publicly available (version 0.1) June of 1991[1]. The project has been snowballing since then, with language updates to 0.2 and 0.5, each compiler bootstrapped from the previous. These versions of the language are most indebted to Stephen Omohundro, Chu-Cheow Lim, and Heinz Schmidt. pSather co-evolved with primary contributions by Jerome Feldman, Chu-Cheow Lim, Franco Mazzanti and Stephan Murer. The first pSather compiler [2] was implemented by Chu-cheow Lim on the Sequent Symmetry, workstations and the CM-5.

> [1] C. Lim, A. Stolcke. "Sather language design and performance evaluation." TR-91-034, International Computer Science Institute, May 1991. Also available at the Sather WWW page.

> [2] C. Lim. "A Parallel Object-Oriented System for Realizing Reusable and Efficient Data Abstractions," PhD thesis, University of California at Berkeley, October 1993. Available at the Sather WWW page.

Sather 1.0 was a major language change, introducing bound routines, iterators, proper separation of typing and code inclusion, contravariant typing, strongly typed parameterization, exceptions, stronger optional runtime checks and a new library design[3]. The 1.0 compiler was a completely fresh effort by Stephen Omohundro, David Stoutamire and Robert Greisemer. It was written in 0.5 with the 1.0 features introduced as they became functional. The 1.0 compiler was first released in the summer of 1994, and Stephen left the project shortly afterwards. The pSather 1.0 design was largely due to Jerome Feldman, Stephan Murer and David Stoutamire.

> [3] S. Omohundro. "The Sather programming language." Dr. Dobb's Journal, 18 (11) pp. 42-48, October 1993. Available at the Sather WWW page.

This document describes Sather 1.1, released the summer of 1996. The compiler was originally designed and implemented by S. Omohundro, D. Stoutamire and (later) Robert Griesemer. Boris Vaysman is the current Sather czar and feature implementor. Claudio Fleiner implemented most of the common optimizations, a lot of debugging support, the pSather runtime and back-end support for pSather. Michael Philippsen implmented the front/middle support for pSather. Holger Klawitter implemented type checking of parametrized classes. Arno Jacobsen worked on bound iterators. Illya Varnasky implemented inlining support and Trevor Paring implemented an early version of common subexpression elimination.

A group at the University of Karlsruhe under the direction of Gerhard Goos created a compiler for Sather 0.1. The language their compiler supports, Sather-K, diverged from the ICSI specification when Sather 1.0 was released. Karlsruhe has created a large class library called Karla using Sather-K. It seems that development of Sather-K has ceased silently sometimes in the past, although no detailed information could gathered about that. More information about Sather-K can be found at:

At the end of 1998, the development of Sather at the ICSI came to a halt. The last release there was the beta-version 1.2b. Short time later, this version was taken up into the GNU project by Norbert Nemec. The ICSI agreed to change the license to GPL/LGPL to make that step possible. From here on, GNU Sather will be developed in a open style, i.e. everybody is welcome to join the team and help improving the compiler, the library, the documentation and the tools that make up the Sather distribution.

As a intermediate step, the development of GNU Sather is being halted until a group at Waikato, New Zealand, led by Keith Hopper, have finished their complete rework of the Sather library, which is expected any time during fall 1999. After thorough testing of the library, it will replace the library we have right now.

## 1.6.1. The Name

Sather was developed at the International Computer Science Institute, a research institute affiliated with the computer science department of the University of California at Berkeley. The Sather language gets its name from the Sather Tower (popularly known as the Campanile), the best-known landmark on campus. A symbol of the city and the university, it is the Berkeley equivalent of the Golden Gate bridge across the bay. Erected in 1914, the tower is modeled after St. Mark's Campanile in Venice, Italy. It is smaller and a bit younger than the Eiffel tower. The way most people say the name of the language rhymes with 'bather'.

The name 'Sather' is a pun of sorts - Sather was originally envisioned as a smaller, efficient, cleaned-up alternative to the language Eiffel. However, since its conception the two languages have evolved to be quite distinct.

## 1.6.2. Sather's Antecedents

Sather has adopted ideas from a number of other languages. Its primary debt is to Eiffel, designed by Bertrand Meyer, but it has also been influenced by C, C++, Cecil, CLOS, CLU, Common Lisp, Dylan, ML, Modula-3, Oberon, Objective C, Pascal, SAIL, School, Self, and Smalltalk.

Steve Omohundro was the original driving force behind Sather, keeping the language specification from being pillaged by the unwashed hordes and serving as point man for the Sather community until he left in 1994. Chu-Cheow Lim bootstrapped the original compiler and was largely responsible for the original 0.x compiler and the first implementation of pSather. David Stoutamire took over as language tsar and compiler writer after Stephen left. That position was, in turn, taken over by Boris Vaysman in late 1995.

Sather has been very much a group effort; many, many people have been involved in the language design discussions including: Subutai Ahmad, Krste Asanovic, Jonathan Bachrach, David Bailey, Joachim Beer, Jeff Bilmes, Chris Bitmead, Peter Blicher, John Boyland, Matthew Brand, Henry Cejtin, Alex Cozzi, Richard Durbin, Jerry Feldman, Carl Feynman, Claudio Fleiner, Ben Gomes, Gerhard Goos, Robert Griesemer, Hermann Häertig, John Hauser, Ari Huttunen, Roberto Ierusalimschy, Arno Jacobsen, Matt Kennel, Holger Klawitter, Phil Kohn, Franz Kurfess, Franco Mazzanti, Stephan Murer, Michael Philippsen, Thomas Rauber, Steve Renals, Noemi de La Rocque Rodriguez, Hans Rohnert, Heinz Schmidt, Carlo Sequin, Andreas Stolcke, Clemens Szyperski, Martin Trapp, Boris Vaysman, and Bob Weiner. Countless others have assisted with practical matters such as porting the compiler and libraries.

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