SAIL (programming language)
SAIL ( Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language ) is a programming language that was developed in the 1970s by Dan Swinehart and Bob Sproull at the Stanford AI Laboratory at Stanford University . SAIL was originally an extensive Algol-60 -like language for PDP-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 computers from Digital Equipment Corporation .
The main characteristic of SAIL was a symbolic data storage based on an associative memory . This system was a further development of the LEAP programming language by Jerry Feldman and Paul Rovner. Data could be stored in it as unordered sets or as associations (triplets). Other features were the possibility of process control with events and interrupts, the management of contexts, backtracking and memory management (garbage collection). SAIL contained block-structured macros, a possibility to write coroutines and a whole range of new data types with which one could design search trees and associative lists.
A number of interesting software systems were programmed in SAIL, such as early versions of FTP and TeX , a document formatting system called PUB, and the first interactive spreadsheet program, BRIGHT .
In 1978 there were half a dozen different operating systems for the PDP-10: ITS (MIT), WAITS (Stanford), TOPS-10 (DEC), CMU TOPS-10 (Carnegie Mellon), TENEX ( BBN ) and TOPS-20 (von DEC, based on TENEX). SAIL was ported from WAITS to ITS so that researchers at MIT could use the software developed at Stanford University. Porting usually required a complete rewrite of the I / O code of each affected application.
A machine independent version of SAIL called MAINSAIL was developed in the late 1970s and used in the development of many ECAD programs in the 1980s. MAINSAIL was easily portable to new processors and operating systems and is still used occasionally even after the turn of the millennium.