from
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (8 July 2008)
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language
<language> (SAIL) Dan Swinehart & Bob Sproull, Stanford AI
Project, 1970. A large ALGOL 60-like language for the DEC-10
and DEC-20. Its main feature is a symbolic data system based
upon an associative store (originally called LEAP). Items may
be stored as unordered sets or as associations (triples).
Processes, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking and
record garbage collection. Block- structured macros. "Recent
Developments in SAIL - An ALGOL-based Language for Artificial
Intelligence", J. Feldman et al, Proc FJCC 41(2), AFIPS (Fall
1972). (See MAINSAIL).
The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at {SAIL}
(the place). It was an ALGOL 60 derivative with a coroutining
facility and some new data types intended for building search
trees and association lists.
A number of interesting software systems were coded in SAIL,
including early versions of {FTP} and {TeX} and a document
formatting system called {PUB}.
In 1978, there were half a dozen different operating systems
for the PDP-10: WAITS (Stanford), ITS (MIT), TOPS-10 (DEC),
CMU TOPS-10 (CMU), TENEX (BBN), and TOPS-20 (DEC, after
TENEX).
SAIL was ported from {WAITS} to {ITS} so that {MIT}
researchers could make use of software developed at {Stanford
University}. Every port usually required the rewriting of I/O
code in each application.
[{Jargon File}]
(2001-06-22)