Information Processing Language: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 00:09, 3 October 2004

Revision as of 18:36, 28 March 2006

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'''Information Processing Language''' (IPL) was a [[programming language]] developed by [[Allen Newell]], [[Cliff Shaw]], and [[Herbert Simon]] at [[RAND Corporation]] and the [[Carnegie Institute of Technology]] from about 1956. It included features intended to support programs that could perform general problem solving, including lists, associations, schemas (frames), dynamic memory allocation, data types, recursion, associative retrieval, functions as arguments, generators (streams), and [[cooperative multitasking]]. Newell had the role of language specifier/-application programmer, Shaw was the system programmer and Simon took the role of application programmer/-user.

IPL was used to implement several early [[artificial intelligence]] programs, also by the same authors: the [[Logic Theory Machine]] (1956), the [[General Problem Solver]] (1957), and their [[computer chess]] program [[NSS]] (1958).

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IPL pioneered the concept of list processing.

The first application of IPL was to demonstrate that the theorems in ''[[Principia Mathematica]]'' which were laboriously proven by hand, by [[Bertrand Russell]] and [[Alfred North Whitehead]], could in fact be proven by computation. According to Simon's autobiography ''Models of My Life'', this first application was developed first by hand simulation, using his children as the computing elements, while writing on and holding up note cards as the registers which contained the state variables of the program.

To this day in the [[CRC method]], object-oriented programmers still use note cards to encapsulate simple attributes of the roles played by the programmed objects.