SAIL (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:53, 30 November 2005

Revision as of 02:48, 9 December 2005

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'''SAIL''', the '''Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language''', was developed by Dan Swinehart and Sproull of the [[Stanford AI Lab]] in 1970. It was originally a large [[ALGOL 60]]-like language for the DEC[[PDP-10]] and DEC[[DECSYSTEM-20]].

SAIL's 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). Other features include processes, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking and record garbage collection. It also has block-structured macros, a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search trees and association lists.

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A number of interesting software systems were coded in SAIL, including early versions of [[FTP]] and [[TeX]], a document formatting system called PUB, and the first general purpose, interactive spreadsheet program called BRIGHT.

In 1978, there were half a dozen different operating systems for the PDP-10: WAITS[[Incompatible Timesharing System|ITS]] (StanfordMIT), ITS[[WAITS]] (MITStanford), [[TOPS-10]] (DEC), [[CMU TOPS-10]] (CMU), TENEX ([[Bolt, Beranek and Newman|BBN]]), and [[TOPS-20]] (DEC, afterbased on 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.

A machine-independent version of SAIL called MAINSAIL was developed in the late 1970's and was used to develop many eCAD design tools during the 1980's. MAINSAIL was easily portable to new processors and operating systems, and is still in limited use as of 2005.