Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
programming"?
-Peter
--
Peter Seibel ·····@javamonkey.com
Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp
Peter Seibel <·····@javamonkey.com> writes:
> Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> programming"?
LISP is a List Oriented Symbolic Language, dates 1956.
SNOBOL is a String Oriented Symbolic Language, dates 1962.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snobol
COMIT is a String Oriented Language (is it Symbolic?), dates 1957.
But in any case, LISP is amongst the very first programming languages
whatever their category:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_timeline
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
The world will now reboot; don't bother saving your artefacts.
Peter Seibel wrote:
> Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> programming"?
It's hard to trace these things back to their origins in my experience.
That's mainly because terminology tends to change over the decades. For
example, what was called "functional programming" in the 70's wouldn't
necessarily be called functional programming anymore today.
The early papers by Daniel Bobrow are probably helpful. See
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Bobrow:Daniel_G=.html
Especially: "New Programming Languages for Artificial Intelligence
Research", ACM Comput. Surv. 6(3): 153-174 (1974), in which the authors
state that the "major contribution of the symbol-manipulation languages
was the introduction of symbolic data types, such as lists, trees, and
strings."
The following is probably also helpful: "A comparison of list-processing
computer languages: including a detailed comparison of COMIT, IPL-V,
LISP 1.5, and SLIP", Commun. ACM 7(4): 231-240 (1964).
Pascal
--
Tyler: "How's that working out for you?"
Jack: "Great."
Tyler: "Keep it up, then."
Pascal Costanza wrote:
> ...
> The following is probably also helpful: "A comparison of list-processing
> computer languages: including a detailed comparison of COMIT, IPL-V,
> LISP 1.5, and SLIP", Commun. ACM 7(4): 231-240 (1964).
from what i remember. IPL-V and COMIT predate Lisp, but were pretty
limited, not much beyond symbolic processing (at least that's what I
gathered from Sammet's book on programming languages). SLIP came later
(Weizenbaum mentioned that he picked the name to tease his friend
McCarthy) and was a subroutine package for Fortran. Btw, SLIP was used
to write the original implementation of Elisa.
hs
Peter Seibel wrote:
> Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> programming"?
>
> -Peter
>
In Daniel Crevier's _Aritficial Intelligence_ (pg. 44-46) he talks about
the development of Newell, Simon, and Shaw's 'Logic Theorist' program.
He states that the program wasn't implemented until IPL (Information
Processing Language) was created by the trio. 'Logic Theorist' was later
featured at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, so IPL is at least that
old. Crevier says that McCarthy announced Lisp in 1958 and incorporated
ideas from IPL in its design (pg. 60). He also says COMIT was developed
in 1962 at MIT.
David Sletten
In article <····················@twister.socal.rr.com>,
David Sletten <·····@slytobias.com> wrote:
> Peter Seibel wrote:
>
> > Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> > mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> > programming"?
> >
> > -Peter
> >
>
> In Daniel Crevier's _Aritficial Intelligence_ (pg. 44-46) he talks about
> the development of Newell, Simon, and Shaw's 'Logic Theorist' program.
> He states that the program wasn't implemented until IPL (Information
> Processing Language) was created by the trio. 'Logic Theorist' was later
> featured at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956, so IPL is at least that
> old. Crevier says that McCarthy announced Lisp in 1958 and incorporated
> ideas from IPL in its design (pg. 60). He also says COMIT was developed
> in 1962 at MIT.
A good source on the exact chronology of these developments is
the Historical Addendum in Newell and Simon's tome "Human Problem
Solving." Flipping through it at my desk, I see that the Addendum
itself cites:
Newell, A., & Tonge, F. M. (1960). An introduction to
Information Processing Programming Language V. Communications
of the ACM, 3: 205-211.
Newell, A., Tonge, F. M., Feigenbaum, E. A., Green, B. F.,
Kelly, H. A., & Mealy, G. (1964). Information Processing
Language V Manual (2nd Ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall. [pp. xx-xxiv]
Knuth, D. E. (1968). The art of computer programming, Vol. 1,
fundamental algorithms. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. [pp.
456-463.]
See also p. 98 and p. 216 of:
McCorduck, P. (1979). Machines who think. San Francisco, CA:
W. H. Freeman and Company.
for references suggesting that Herbert Gelerntner at IBM developed
a language intermediate to IPL and Lisp.
I don't know when Newell switched from IPL to Lisp. Flipping
through Newell's first paper on production systems, written in
1970 and publiched in 1973, it seems pretty clear that Lisp was
used.
Peter Seibel wrote:
> Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> programming"?
>
> -Peter
>
Take a look here for a complete history:
http://www.levenez.com/lang/
Lieven <···············@hotmail.com> writes:
> Peter Seibel wrote:
>
> > Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> > mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> > programming"?
> >
> > -Peter
> >
>
> Take a look here for a complete history:
>
> http://www.levenez.com/lang/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_timeline
seems more complete for now...
--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/
The world will now reboot; don't bother saving your artefacts.
Pascal Bourguignon <····@mouse-potato.com> writes:
> Lieven <···············@hotmail.com> writes:
>
> > Peter Seibel wrote:
> >
> > > Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> > > mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> > > programming"?
> > >
> > > -Peter
> > >
> >
> > Take a look here for a complete history:
> >
> > http://www.levenez.com/lang/
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_timeline
> seems more complete for now...
Not really. It's missing all of the Lisp family except for Scheme
and K. For all of the detail it goes into with other language
families, one would expect at least some of the Lisp languages that
have had some impact; I would have expected Common Lisp, emacs-lisp,
maybe even autolisp, plus MacLisp, NIL, etc., none of which are
mentioned.
--
Duane Rettig ·····@franz.com Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/
555 12th St., Suite 1450 http://www.555citycenter.com/
Oakland, Ca. 94607 Phone: (510) 452-2000; Fax: (510) 452-0182
"Duane Rettig" <·····@franz.com> wrote in message
··················@franz.com...
I would have expected Common Lisp, emacs-lisp,
> maybe even autolisp, plus MacLisp, NIL, etc., none of which are
> mentioned.
>
I did not see Lisp/VM or IBM Lisp included in their list either. Whether one
would agree with them or not, the IBM Yorktown Heights group, which
developed that very comprehensive version of Lisp on S/370 architecture
systems, had come up with a whole diatribe they loved to go through (in
front of customers, especially) explaining why they had chosen not to follow
the (at that time emerging) Common Lisp paradigm.
Panos C. Lekkas
·······@ieee.org
Duane Rettig <·····@franz.com> wrote:
> Pascal Bourguignon <····@mouse-potato.com> writes:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_timeline
>> seems more complete for now...
>
> Not really. It's missing all of the Lisp family except for Scheme
> and K. For all of the detail it goes into with other language
> families, one would expect at least some of the Lisp languages that
> have had some impact; I would have expected Common Lisp, emacs-lisp,
> maybe even autolisp, plus MacLisp, NIL, etc., none of which are
> mentioned.
Wow. It's a Wiki. Someone came just today and added Common Lisp and
Dylan. Can you believe it? :)
--
Karl A. Krueger <········@example.edu> { s/example/whoi/ }
Every program has at least one bug and can be shortened by at least one line.
By induction, every program can be reduced to one line which does not work.
From: Jeff Sandys
Subject: Re: Symbolic programming prior to LISP?
Date:
Message-ID: <419E9AF5.AFEB21DE@juno.com>
Since Lisp was developed on one of the 27 IBM704's built I doubt that
there could be a predecessor, but Simon developed his symbolic program,
the General Problem Solver (GPS) on the IBM650, but this was more of a
tabulating machine, and I don't think that Simon wrote a programming
language for it.
Thanks,
Jeff Sandys
Peter Seibel wrote:
>
> Are there any languages prior to McCarthy's LISP that could claim the
> mantle of "first programming language designed to support symbolic
> programming"?
>
> -Peter
>
> --
> Peter Seibel ·····@javamonkey.com
>
> Lisp is the red pill. -- John Fraser, comp.lang.lisp