Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language


Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language

(language)(SAIL) Dan Swinehart & Bob Sproull, Stanford AIProject, 1970. A large ALGOL 60-like language for the DEC-10and DEC-20. Its main feature is a symbolic data system basedupon an associative store (originally called LEAP). Items maybe stored as unordered sets or as associations (triples).Processes, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking andrecord garbage collection. Block- structured macros. "RecentDevelopments in SAIL - An ALGOL-based Language for ArtificialIntelligence", J. Feldman et al, Proc FJCC 41(2), AFIPS (Fall1972). (See MAINSAIL).

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.