Sather vs Java

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SathervsJava

• Brian Oh
• Ann Win

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• Introduction (of Sather)
• History (of Sather)
• Comparison between Java and Sather
• Sample - Hello World
• Future (of Sather)
• For more info....

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Introduction

• Sather is an object oriented language
• It was designed to be simple, efficient, safe and
  non-proprietary.
• Sather 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.

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History

• Sather was developed at the International
  Computer Science Institute, a research institute
  affiliated with the CS department of UC Berkeley.
• Sather language got its name from the Sather
  Tower (popularly known as the Campanile), the
  best-known landmark on UC Berkeley.

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History

• Initial Sather compiler (ver 0) was written in
  summer of 1990.
• ICSI made Sather (ver 0.1) publicly available on
  June of 1991.
• Ver 0.2 and 0.5 followed.
• Sather 1.0 was released in 1994, and most of the
  major features such as bound routines and
  iteration, etc was first introduced in this
  version
• Latest version is Sather 1.1, released the summer
  of 1996.

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History

• Sather was originally designed and implemented by
  Steve Omohundro, David Stoutamire and (later)
  Robert Griesemer. Boris Vaysman is the current
  Sather feature implementor.
• Sather has adopted ideas from Eiffel. 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.

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Comparison

• Object Oriented Programming
• Like Java, Sather is object oriented.
• All entities in Sather are objects, and objects
  are defined by classes.
• Some basic classes ( INT, FLT, STR). These
  represents integers, floating point numbers, and
  strings.

Ex) Java float a3.0 int b 5 String c foo
Ex) Sather aFLT 3.0 bINT 5 cSTR
foo
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Comparison

• Garbage collection
• Like Java, Sather collects garbage automatically.
  
• The runtime system does this automatically when
  it is safe to do so. But Sather does allow the
  programmer to manually deallocate objects,
  letting the garbage collector handle the
  remainder.
• Sather applications generate far less garbage
  than typical SmallTalk or Lisp Programs.

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Comparison

• Strong Type Language
• Like Java, Sather is a (statically-checked)
  strong type language.
• Sather is contravariant. That means that it isnt
  possible to get type errors at runtime. It also
  means that the Sather programmer needs to insert
  explicit type checks (using a typecase) in places
  where a covariant compiler would have inserted an
  implicit check for you.

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Comparison

• No implicit Calls
• Like Java, Sather does explicit method
  declarations.
• Sather does as little as possible behind the
  users back at runtime. Meaning, there is no
  implicitly constructed temp objects.
• Also Sather never converts types implicitly, such
  as from integer to character, integer to floating
  point, single to double precision, or subclass to
  superclass.

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Comparison

• Robustness .. Why? Java and Sather both has
  characteristics of ....
• no pointer, eliminates of a overwriting of
  memory and corrupting data
• automatic garbage collection
• Strong type language, allows extensive
  compile-time checking
• explicit method declarations
• good exception handling

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ComparisonReasons for using Java over Sather

• Java is very popular...
• distributed so that TCP/IP, networking is easier
• architecture neutral.. Java can use same code on
  many machines while, Sather can not
• multithreaded can be done easier.. Java does
  multithreading on application level and not at
  the operating system level.. So it is a lot
  easier to do multithreading with Java then Sather.

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ComparisonReasons for using Sather over Java

• Itegrators .. These methods encapsulate user
  defined looping control structures, with
  creation, increment and termination check.
• Sather is as efficient as C, C, or Fortran, as
  elegant but safer than Eiffel or CLU, and support
  higher-order functions as well as Common Lisp,
  Scheme, or SmallTalk.. So it is great for wide
  variety of research related computational tasks.
• It lets you use a large, freely available,
  high-quality of efficient well-written classes...
  Such as Laplace or Krylov matrix solver..

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Hello World Program

• public class HelloWorld
• public static void main (String args)
• System.out.println (Hello World)
• //end of main
• // end of class HelloWorld
• -------------------------------------------------
• javac HelloWorld.java
• promptgt java HelloWorld
• Hello World

• Class HELLO
• is
• main
• is
• out Hello World!\n
• end -- end of main
• end -- end of class HelloWorld
• -------------------------------------------
• cs -main HELLO -o hw hw.sa
• promptgt hw
• Hello World

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Future of Sather

• ?? ??
• Sather will be around but it will not be as
  popular as Java, C, C or Fortran.
• ?? ??

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For more info

• visit
• http//www.icsi.berkeley.edu/Sather
• or e-mail
• sather_at_icsi.berkeley.edu
• or subscribe the news group
• comp.lang.sather