List processing is a computer programming language that involves the maintenance and manipulation of lists of data. It involves such actions as the adding and deleting of elements, writing data into elements, and examining the list. List processing is the basis of the artificial-intelligence (AI) programming language LISP (LISt Processing), and it is one of the oldest computer languages still in widespread use. American computer scientist John McCarthy (1927-) developed list processing from 1959 to 1960.

There are many variants (or dialects) of LISP including Scheme and T. In the 1980s there was an attempt to standardize the language. The result is Common LISP, which is now the most popular dialect. Since its creation list processing has undergone considerable evolution over the years, and modern variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5.

Unlike most languages (such as C, Pascal, or FORTRAN), list processing uses an...