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
Famous quotes containing the words legacy, computer and/or programming:
“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“What, then, is the basic difference between today’s computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern—a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.”
—Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904)
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)