Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language
(language)The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at SAIL(the place). It was an ALGOL 60 derivative with a coroutiningfacility and some new data types intended for building searchtrees and association lists.
A number of interesting software systems were coded in SAIL,including early versions of FTP and TeX and a documentformatting system called PUB.
In 1978, there were half a dozen different operating systemsfor the PDP-10: WAITS (Stanford), ITS (MIT), TOPS-10 (DEC),CMU TOPS-10 (CMU), TENEX (BBN), and TOPS-20 (DEC, afterTENEX).
SAIL was ported from WAITS to ITS so that MITresearchers could make use of software developed at Stanford University. Every port usually required the rewriting of I/Ocode in each application.