sagan /say'gn/ n.
[from Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos"; think "billions and
billions"] A large quantity of anything. "There's a sagan
different ways to tweak EMACS." "The U.S. Government spends
sagans on bombs and welfare -- hard to say which is more
destructive."
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SAIL /sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ n.
1. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. 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. 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.