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SAIL was much simpler than Ada.<br>
Compilation was fast.<br>
It had the added LEAP feature with allowed one to use associative
triples.<br>
I didn't use that feature much.<br>
<br>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare">Tymshare Inc</a>
used SAIL on their PDP-10s because the parallel programing<br>
features of the language were more efficient than the Top-10
operating<br>
system on which it ran. Tymshare was located on Valley Green Drive<br>
which Apple Computer has now taken over. I and one other fellow
wrote<br>
an email system in SAIL for Tymshare that could handle 30,000
messages a day. <br>
We were pretty happy with that.<br>
<br>
SAIL was transformed into <a
href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2464497/">MAINSAIL</a>
(MAchine INdependent SAIL) by Clark Wilcox at Stanford and<a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Feigenbaum"> Ed<br>
Feigenbaum</a> used it for AI research and students of <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead">Carver Mead</a>
used it for <br>
cell libraries developed for silicon ASIC designs. I took MAINSAIL
to Wang Labs and used it for<br>
maintaining their multiple language voice mail system.<br>
<br>
-Doug <br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 11/10/2016 10:54 PM, Lars wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:0900dc6d62c1afa4ad1c63d52e4ced4f.squirrel@gator3286.hostgator.com"
type="cite">
<pre wrap="">On Thu, November 10, 2016 7:26 pm, Douglas G Danforth wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">We used SAIL for our programming language (Stanford AI Language,
or Stanford AI memo L) which was a variant of Algol.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap="">
Sail, although I haven't looked into deeply, looks like a monster, almost
like an Ada with everything and the kitchen sink included.
i.e. not a small simple language but a big beast.
Were the compilers for sail absolute monsters of code, a huge undertaking?
Were they reliable compilers/interpreters? From my brief readings about
SAIL it just seems that it's such a large beast that it probably was
buggy, since it included everything and the kitchen sink for features.
Did you like it? think it was way too complex? Although it doesn't look
like a simple language did it have some features that just weren't
available in other languages which gave you an advantage?
Why is SAIL not used today very much? or maybe it is: I'd have to research.
--
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</pre>
</blockquote>
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