Information Processing Language (IPL) is 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 includes 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. A programming language is an artificial language that can be used to control the behavior of a machine, particularly a computer. ... Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 - July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie-Mellon’s School of Computer Science. ... J.C. (Cliff) Shaw was a systems programmer at the RAND Corporation. ... Herbert Alexander Simon (June 15, 1916 – February 9, 2001) was a researcher in the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, public administration, economics and philosophy (sometimes described as a polymath). ... Alternate meanings: See RAND (disambiguation) The RAND Corporation is an American think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the U.S. military. ... The Carnegie Institute of Technology (Carnegie Tech), the predecessor to Carnegie Mellon University, was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. ... In computing, cooperative multitasking (or non-preemptive multitasking) is a form of multitasking in which multiple tasks execute by voluntarily ceding control to other tasks at programmer-defined points within each task. ...

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). // Hondas intelligent humanoid robot AI redirects here. ... General Problem Solver (GPS) was a computer program created in 1957 by Herbert Simon and Allen Newell to build a universal problem solver machine. ... 1990s Pressure-sensory Chess Computer with LCD screen The idea of creating a chess-playing machine dates back to the eighteenth century. ... NSS is an acronym for: Naked Short Selling: Naked Short Selling is the illegal practice of short selling shares that may not even exist. ...

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. The Principia Mathematica is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics, written by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910-1913. ... Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was a British philosopher, logician, and mathematician, working mostly in the 20th century. ... Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861 Ramsgate, Kent, England– December 30, 1947 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA) was an English mathematician who became an American philosopher. ...

To this day in the Class-Responsibility-Collaboration card (CRC method), object-oriented programmers still use note cards to encapsulate simple attributes of the roles played by the programmed objects. Class-Responsibility-Collaboration cards (CRC cards) are a brainstorming tool used in the design of object-oriented software. ... CRC is an abbreviation for: Christian Reformed Church Class-Responsibility-Collaboration cards, popularized by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock, and Ward Cunningham of WikiWikiWeb fame. ...

Several versions of IPL were created: IPL-I (never implemented), IPL-II (1957 for JOHNNIAC), IPL-III (existed briefly), IPL-IV, IPL-V (1958, for IBM 650, IBM 704, IBM 7090, many others. Widely used), IPL-VI. The JOHNNIAC or John (v. ... IBM 650 front panel, showing bi-quinary indicators IBM 650 front panel, rear view The IBM 650 was one of IBM’s early computers, and the world’s first mass-produced computer. ... The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in April, 1956. ... IBM 7090 console The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for large-scale scientific and technological applications. The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series scientific computers. ...

However the language was soon displaced by Lisp, which had similar features but a simpler syntax and the benefit of automatic garbage collection. Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive fully-parenthesized syntax. ... In computer science, garbage collection (also known as GC) is a form of automatic memory management. ...

Publications

• Newell, A. and F.C. Shaw. "Programming the Logic Theory Machine." Feb. 1957. Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, pp. 230-240.
• Newell, Allen, and Fred M. Tonge. 1960. "An Introduction to Information Processing Language V." CACM 3(4): 205-211.
• Newell, Allen. 1964. Information processing language-v manual; Second Edition. Rand Corporation [Allen Newell], Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

References

This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (FOLDOC) is an online, searchable encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects. ... GNU logo (similar in appearance to a gnu) The GNU Free Documentation License (GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a copyleft license for free content, designed by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) for the GNU project. ...

• Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon, Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences - includes a short section on IPL.
• History of Programming Languages: IPL
• Information Processing Language, FOLDOC