sail

n 1: a large piece of fabric (as canvas) by means of which wind

is used to propel a sailing vessel [syn: {canvas}, {canvass},

{sheet}]

2: an ocean trip taken for pleasure [syn: {cruise}]

v 1: travel by ship on (a body of water); "We sailed the

Atlantic"; "This frigate has sailed to France"

2: move with sweeping, effortless, gliding motions; "The diva

swept into the room"; "Shreds of paper sailed through the

air"; "The searchlights swept across the sky" [syn: {sweep}]

3: travel in a boat propelled by wind

4: travel by boat [syn: {voyage}, {navigate}]

SAIL

/sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ 1. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence

Laboratory. An important site in the early development of

LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU, XEROX PARC, and the Unix

community, one of the major wellsprings of technical

innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the {WAITS}

entry for details). The SAIL machines were shut down in late

May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI Lab's ITS cluster was

officially decommissioned.

2. Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language. 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

(sense 1). It was an ALGOL 60 derivative with a coroutining

facility and some new data types intended for building search

trees and association lists.

3. Early system on Larc computer. Listed in CACM 2(5):16 (May

1959).

[{Jargon File}]