The L1 and L2 interpreted languages were developed by

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

in the 1950s to provide

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...

arithmetic capabilities, simplified memory access, and other enhancements for the IBM model

650 __NOTOC__ Year 650 (DCL) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. The denomination 650 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era bec ...

(IBM 650) digital computer and allow users to more easily develop application-specific code for these machines.

History

L1 was developed by Michael Wolontis and Dolores Leagus and was released in September 1955. Later,

Richard Hamming Richard Wesley Hamming (February 11, 1915 – January 7, 1998) was an American mathematician whose work had many implications for computer engineering and telecommunications. His contributions include the Hamming code (which makes use of a Ha ...

and

Ruth A. Weiss Ruth A. Weiss is a British-American software engineer known for her work in computer graphics, especially the hidden-line removal problem. She also developed, together with Richard Hamming, the L2 programming language, a floating-point math ...

developed the L2 package which enhanced L1 by providing additional mathematical capabilities tailored to more engineering-oriented applications. L1 and L2 were widely used within Bell Labs, and also by outside users, who usually called them "Bell 1 and Bell 2." According to Bell Labs, "In the late 1950s, at least half the IBM 650s doing scientific and engineering work used either Bell 1 or Bell 2."

References

Discontinued programming languages Bell Labs {{Compu-stub