History
The first interpreted high-level language was probably Lisp. Lisp was first implemented by Steve Russell on an IBM 704 computer. Russell had read John McCarthy's paper, and realized (to McCarthy's surprise) that the Lisp eval function could be implemented in machine code. The result was a working Lisp interpreter which could be used to run Lisp programs, or more properly, 'evaluate Lisp expressions.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)
Read more about this topic: Interpreter (computing)
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