Engineering a Programming Language: The Type and Class System of Sather

Abstract

Sather 1.0 is a programming language whose design has resulted from the interplay of many criteria. It attempts to support a powerful object-oriented paradigm without sacrificing either the computational performance of traditional procedural languages or support for safety and correctness checking. Much of the engineering effort went into the design of the class and type system. This paper describes some of these design decisions and relates them to approaches taken in other languages. We particularly focus on issues surrounding inheritance and subtyping and the decision to explicitly separate them in Sather.