Recent developments in SAIL: an ALGOL-based language for artificial intelligence

Progress in Artificial Intelligence has traditionally been accompanied by advances in special purpose programming techniques and languages. Virtually all of this development has been concentrated in languages and systems oriented to list processing. As the efforts of Artificial Intelligence researchers began to turn from purely symbolic problems toward interaction with the real world, certain features of algebraic languages became desirable. There were several attempts (notably LISP2 and FORMULA ALGOL) to combine the best features of both kinds of language. At the same time, designers of algebraic languages began to include features for non-numerical computation. No new general purpose language without some sort of list processing facility has been suggested for several years. We have followed a tack somewhat different from either of these in the design of SAIL and in its subsequent modifications.