Allen Newell

Computer science is the study of the phenomena surrounding computers. The founders of this society understood this very well when they called themselves the Association for Computing Machinery. The machine—not just the hardware, but the programmed, living machine—is the organism we study.

IPL-V (Information Processing Language-V) is a programming language for list processing and symbol manipulation. It is the fifth of a series of programming languages that has developed as part of a research effort in artificial intelligence and simulation of cognitive processes. This research started in late 1954 at The RAND Corporation and Carnegie Institute of Technology and has remained centered there, so that these two organizations, or more properly the scientists thereof, can be considered the source of the language. The earlier IPL's were coded for the RAND JOHNNIAC, a unique machine of the Princeton class; IPL-V is the only one which has become a “public” language and where the necessary effort has been made to document and standardize the language.