An acronym for Text Reckoning And Compiling, TRAC is a programming language developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s by Calvin Mooers.
Implemented on a PDP-10 in 1964, TRAC T64 was used until 1984, when it was updated to TRAC T84.
TRAC is a purely text-based language, and a macro language. However, unlike traditional macro languages of that time, TRAC was well planned, consistent, and largely complete. It features explicit input and output operators, as opposed to the typical implicit I/O at the outermost macro level, which makes it simpler and more versatile than older macro languages.
As a text-processing language, TRAC may also be considered a string-processing language. Its emphasis on strings is so strong that the language provides mechanisms for handling its own syntactic characters either in their syntactic roles or like any other character.
Like APL or Lisp, TRAC is an expression-oriented language. Unlike APL, however, it lacks operators. It nearly qualifies as a pure functional programming language. TRAC's syntax is similar to Lisp.
TRAC inspired the development of the TTM programming language, and perhaps another. Although it has never been formally acknowledged, the SAM76 programming language is believed to have been an implementation of TRAC (Same As Mooer's), which was denied because of Calvin Mooer's fierce defense of the copyright he had taken out on TRAC.
The focus of this category is on the programming language known as TRAC. Resources for the language itself, as well as any implementations or dialects, are appropriate for this category, as are any IDE's editors, or other tools created to facilitate programming in TRAC, and any TRAC user groups, forums, tutorials, or guides.
Recommended Resources
ACM Digital Library: TRAC, a procedure-describing language for the reactive typewriter
Published in Volume 9, Issue 3 of Communications of the ACM, in March of 1966, an article by Calvin N. Mooers, the creator of the TRAC programming language, describes the language and its processing algorithm. Featured are an abstract, author ID and a biography, article citations, publications, and a table of contents. The full text of the article may be purchased, along with information about pay-per-use permissions.
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365230.365270
Founded in 1967, the RESISTORS was one of the first computer clubs for young people, largely composed of students at Hopewell Valley High School. For most of its existence, it was supported by Claude Kagan, an engineer at the Western Electric Research Center. In their reminiscence site, a former member of the group tells the story of the club's peripheral participation in encounters with the creator of the TRAC programming language and their mentor, who implemented a similar language.
https://www.resistors.org/index.php/The_RESISTORS_and_Trac
The History of Computing Project offers a page honoring the TRAC computer programming language, an interpretive, recursive, string-based, macro-processing language with no compile step. A description of the language and its features is put forth, including its strengths and weaknesses. Examples of TRAC code include a TRAC T84 script to compute Fibonacci numbers. The language specifications and chronology of its development are included.
http://www.thocp.net/software/languages/trac.html
Text Reckoning and Compiling (TRAC) is a programming language by Calvin Mooers in the late 1960s and featured in the Ted Nelson book, Computer Lib, in the 1970s. Similar to Lisp in some ways, the language is based around text strings and, since its operators are text strings, programs are self-modifying. The overall features of the language are discussed, along with some of the reasons why it may have not been successful as a programming language.
http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/TRAC_programming_language
