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Programming Language

IPL (Information Processing Language)

Procedural Language

IPL (Information Processing Language) is one of the earliest computer programming languages, developed beginning in 1956 by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw and Herbert A. Simon at the RAND Corporation and Carnegie Institute of Technology to support their work on the Logic Theorist and General Problem Solver, widely considered among the first artificial intelligence programs. IPL introduced list processing, recursion, dynamic memory allocation, and associative retrieval, concepts that became foundational to later AI-oriented languages, most directly Lisp. IPL programs were written in a low-level, assembly-like notation organized around a stack machine model.

Facts
Paradigm
assembly-language style 1
Significance
Included features to facilitate AI programming and introduced the concepts of symbol processing and list processing. 1
Partially Attested
First Released
1956 1
Source says the language was created about 1956.
Connections

Influenced

Sources
1. Information Processing Language (Wikipedia)
  • Lead, first sentence
    Information Processing Language (IPL) is a programming language created by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw, and Herbert A. Simon at RAND Corporation and the Carnegie Institute of Technology about 1956.
  • Lead, second paragraph, fourth sentence
    Unfortunately, all of these innovations were cast in a difficult assembly-language style.
  • Lead, second paragraph, first and second sentences
    IPL included features to facilitate AI programming, specifically problem solving, such as lists, dynamic memory allocation, data types, recursion, functions as arguments, generators, and cooperative multitasking. IPL also introduced the concepts of symbol processing and list processing.
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