Abs tract The Stanford hand-eye system is implemented as several separate tasks, each executing under a timesharing executive. Development of a programming language (SAIL) and augmentation of the timesharing system were required to provide the necessary data sharing and control flow among the tasks. The SAIL language provides facilities for "associative processing," and is extended to serve the data sharing and communication needs of the hand-eye system. Several user facilities are designed to aid running and debugging the system.