Legacy To Computer Programming
IPL arguably introduced several programming language features:
- List manipulation – but only lists of atoms, not general lists
- Property lists – but only when attached to other lists
- Higher-order functions – except that assembly programming has always been able to compute with addresses of functions to call; IPL was an early attempt to generalize this property of assembly language and in a principled way
- Computation with symbols – except that the symbols are letter+number, not full words
- Virtual machine
Many of these features were generalized, cleaned up, and incorporated into Lisp and from there into a wide range of programming languages over the next several decades.
Read more about this topic: Information Processing Language
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