"What is Sather? Sather is an object oriented language which designed to be simple, efficient, 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 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.
Sather code can be compiled into C code and can efficiently link with C object files.
Sather has a very unrestrictive license aimed at encouraging contribution to the public library
without precluding the use of Sather for proprietary projects." (from the Sather FAQs)
"What is pSather? pSather is an extension of the object oriented language Sather.
It adds threads and synchronization mechanisms to the language.
Even though pSather programs can run on distributed computer systems, they offer shared memory across all threads." (from the pSather FAQs)
"Sather-K is a modern object-oriented, imperative programming language that is appropriate for use in teaching, research, and industry.
The language has its origin in Eiffel.
However, the design objective of Sather-K was to get rid of all unnecessary constructions in the language.
The result was a language that is easy to learn and especially efficient in translation and execution.
Sather-K integrates all features of the object-oriented paradigm.
Classes can implemented as generic, they can be embedded in hierarchical structures (by subtyping), and they can reuse parts of other classes.
The concept of streams gives the opportunity of easy navigation through highly pretty complex data structures.
Sather-K is type save, i.e. a lot of errors can be detected (and removed) at compile time
and do therefore not occur at runtime as in other languages." (from the Sather-K home page)