Sather

Sather is an object-oriented programming language that began around 1990 at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, where an international team led by Steve Omohundro designed it. It was originally based on Eiffel but diverged from it, and its name nods to Eiffel by recalling Sather Tower, the Berkeley landmark named for Jane Krom Sather, widow of the university benefactor Peder Sather. The language supports garbage collection and generics by subtypes, and it gradually took on several functional programming features, alongside iterators, design by contract, abstract classes, multiple inheritance, operator overloading, anonymous functions and a contravariant type system. The original Berkeley implementation reached stable version 1.1 in 1995 and was then adopted by the Free Software Foundation as GNU Sather, whose last stable release, 1.2.3, appeared in July 2007. Variants include Sather-K from the University of Karlsruhe, Sather-W from the University of Waikato and pSather, a parallel version for non-uniform memory access multiprocessors. The compiler translates Sather into C and leaves optimization to the C compiler.