[Oberon] blackbox model view controller

[Douglas G Danforth]

SAIL was much simpler than Ada.
Compilation was fast.
It had the added LEAP feature with allowed one to use associative triples.
I didn't use that feature much.

Tymshare Inc <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymshare> used SAIL on their 
PDP-10s because the parallel programing
features of the language were more efficient than the Top-10 operating
system on which it ran.  Tymshare was located on Valley Green Drive
which Apple Computer has now taken over.  I and one other fellow wrote
an email system in SAIL for Tymshare that could handle 30,000 messages a 
day.
We were pretty happy with that.

SAIL was transformed into MAINSAIL 
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2464497/> (MAchine 
INdependent SAIL) by Clark Wilcox at Stanford andEd
Feigenbaum <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Feigenbaum> used it for 
AI research and students of Carver Mead 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carver_Mead> used it for
cell libraries developed for silicon ASIC designs.  I took MAINSAIL to 
Wang Labs and used it for
maintaining their multiple language voice mail system.

-Doug


On 11/10/2016 10:54 PM, Lars wrote:
> On Thu, November 10, 2016 7:26 pm, Douglas G Danforth wrote:
>> We used SAIL for our programming language (Stanford AI Language,
>> or Stanford AI memo L) which was a variant of Algol.
> 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.
> --
> Oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch mailing list for ETH Oberon and related systems
> https://lists.inf.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/oberon
>

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