History
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.
IPL was used to implement several early artificial intelligence programs, also by the same authors: the Logic Theorist (1956), the General Problem Solver (1957), and their computer chess program NSS (1958).
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.
However the language was soon displaced by Lisp, which had far more powerful features, a simpler syntax, and the benefit of automatic garbage collection.
Read more about this topic: Information Processing Language
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