Sather is an object oriented language 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 but safer than Eiffel or CLU, and to support higher-order functio