The L1 and L2 interpreted languages were developed by

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

in the 1950s to provide

floating-point In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a Sign (mathematics), signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some Radix, base) multiplied by an integer power of that ba ...

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

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

model

650 __NOTOC__ Year 650 ( DCL) was a common year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar. The denomination 650 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for ...

(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 mathe ...

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