Source : Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing

Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language
     
         (SAIL) Dan Swinehart & Bob Sproull, Stanford AI
        Project, 1970.  A large ALGOL 60-like language for the DEC-10
        and DEC-20.  Its 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).
        Processes, events and interrupts, contexts, backtracking and
        record garbage collection.  Block- structured macros.  "Recent
        Developments in SAIL - An ALGOL-based Language for Artificial
        Intelligence", J. Feldman et al, Proc FJCC 41(2), AFIPS (Fall
        1972).  (See MAINSAIL).
     
        The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language used at {SAIL}
        (the place).  It was an ALGOL 60 derivative with 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 early versions of {FTP} and {TeX} and a document
        formatting system called {PUB}.
     
        In 1978, there were half a dozen different operating systems
        for the PDP-10: WAITS (Stanford), ITS (MIT), TOPS-10 (DEC),
        CMU TOPS-10 (CMU), TENEX (BBN), and TOPS-20 (DEC, after
        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.
     
        [{Jargon File}]
     
        (2001-06-22)