Currently the title says "Web-based IBM 1620 emulator and IPL-V from 1963" until HN's title policy inevitably vandalizes it to remove the informative part. But, to give further context on IPL-V, IPL (I think actually IPL-IV) was key to some early AI research, but the main reason it's interesting in 02026 is that it's what inspired Lisp. It's a terrible programming language by today's standards, and the manual is a horrible slog, but you can see the seed of almost every programming language popular today in it.
Reading through a CACM publication, I'm struck by how they call the whole system the "IPL Computer" -- they were specifying a bytecode VM. It looks like early IPLs dated to the 1950s, so they'll get a pass for the actual language...
I didn't realize IPL lasted that long since indeed it's mentioned by mccarthy as a strong influence.. somehow I always assumed it meant pre-1959.
btw, for people who were there at the time, even considering the bare metal assembly nature of IPL, were people already approaching solutions similarly to lispers in the 60s ? aka dynamic generic lists, tree traversals etc
Yes. All of those were written in IPL well before Lisp. There were a dozen IPL-V implementations across almost every common computer of tat time. (Of course, there weren’t that many common computers! :-)
The 1964 manual has a list of implementations on pdf pg 3: <a href="https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_randiplInfanguageVSecondEdition1964_15001417" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_randiplInfanguageVSeco...
True enough that IPL inspired Lisp (along with Church’s Lambda Calculus), but, to my mind, what is interesting about IPL-* is that the first true AIs and Cognitive Models were written in it/them, esp The Logic Theorist, which was the first heuristic search program, and which actually improved upon proofs by some of the most famous logicians of the time. David Moews has made several of the original IPL Logic Theorist programs run again (although not on this 1620 platfor’. . . Yet!) :: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116935">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48116935
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btw, for people who were there at the time, even considering the bare metal assembly nature of IPL, were people already approaching solutions similarly to lispers in the 60s ? aka dynamic generic lists, tree traversals etc
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