SAIL (programming language): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 14:49, 17 May 2011

Revision as of 19:54, 25 December 2011

Line 1:

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

SAIL's main feature is a symbolic data system based upon an associative store (based on the [[LEAP (programming language)|LEAP system]] of Jerry Feldman and Paul Rovner). 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.

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