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From: tll@nntp-server.caltech.edu (Tal Lewis Lancaster)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.programmer,comp.sys.amiga.misc
Subject: Re: New Eiffel-like OOP language
Message-ID: <1991Jun17.161534.323@nntp-server.caltech.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 91 16:15:34 GMT
References: <1991Jun16.063222.1304@csis.dit.csiro.au>
Organization: California Institute of Technology, Pasadena
Lines: 54

dave@csis.dit.csiro.au (David Campbell) writes:

>G'day!

>I have seen postings in this group about a possible Amiga version of Eiffel
>(which is a recent object-oriented language & very nice to use).

There will be an Amiga Eiffel.  It is in the beta testing stage now.

>There is a new strongly typed object-oriented language being developed
>at the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley.  This new
>language is called Sather.  Sather is a variant of Eiffel, syntactically
>very similar but simplified and optimized.  They claim that Sather has
>performance 4 to 50 times that of Eiffel.

>The good thing about Sather is that its in the public domain.  Full source
>for a Sparc beta version is available from icsi-ftp.berkeley.edu in directory
>pub/sather.  Sather (like Eiffel) compiles to C and thus should be fairly
>portable.  The run-time-system should be the most difficult part to port to
>the Amiga.  The Sather compiler itself is written in Sather, thus source in C
>(generated from Sather) is included.

There are some problems that I have with Sather.  First of all it is not a
pure sub-set of Eiffel.  There are differences in the syntax such as with
arrays and genericity.  All assertions use the keyword "assert" instead of 
Eiffel's keywords.  And there are other keyword changes.  Also, I have heard
that the compiler isn't very type-safe.  Personally, I feel that could have
been a purer subset of Eiffel and still met its objectives.

>Documentation (.ps) is also available from the ftp site.

>I'm interested in porting but if somebody wants to take charge of any
>serious attempt, do so.

Go for it.  I was tempted to try it myself.  But I am too busy getting the 
Eiffel version finished.

>I think we can give up hope of compiling anything serious with Lattice C,
>I might try using GCC or compiling it on a Sun-3 and using the SOBJA program
>(from the Amiga GCC port) which converts Sun-3 object code to Amiga object
>code.

You will save yourselves a lot of time by going with gcc or Matt's DICE.
Sadly IMOO Lattice/SAS C with human coders in mind and not as intermediate
object coders.  SAS and Aztec can not handle calls to other functions 
greater than 32K in the same object file!  Also beware of the limitations
on SAS's macros.  Also watch out for SAS's scanf()  most un-UNIX like.

>-- Dave Campbell
>-- dave@csis.dit.csiro.au
>-- 
>dave campbell

Tal Lancaster