TRAC: 1964 жылғы жол өңдеу тілінің тарихы мен эволюциясы

Programming language (1964)
also called a string processing language. The emphasis on strings as strings is so strong that TRAC provides mechanisms for handling the language's own syntactic characters either in their syntactic roles or like any other character, and self modifying code has more the feel of a natural consequence of typical TRAC programming techniques than of being a special feature. TRAC is, like APL or LISP, an expression oriented language (in contrast to more typical procedure oriented languages), but unlike APL, it completely lacks operators. In most respects, it is a case of pure functional programming. TRAC is homoiconic. TRAC has in common with LISP a syntax that generally involves the presence of many levels of nested parentheses. The main inspiration for TRAC came from three papers by Douglas McIlroy.

Mooers trademarked the name TRAC in an effort to maintain his control over the definition of the language, an unusual and pioneering action at the time. At one point, he brought an intellectual property infringement suit against DEC, alleging that a contract to deliver a mini computer with a TRAC interpreter violated his rights. "The first issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal, one of the early publications in the personal computer field, has a vitriolic editorial against Mooers and his rapacity in trying to charge people for his computing language." The name has since been used several times for unrelated information technology projects, including a current open source project management system called Trac.

TRAC was later implemented on the PDP 8, PDP 10, and PDP 11. There have been various languages inspired by TRAC. To avoid any trouble with Mooers, they renamed primitives and/or used different metacharacters. In SAM76's case, primitives were added, according to Claude Kagan, "because TRAC is baby talk". In MINT's case, primitives were added to give access to a sophisticated text editor machinery. one perceived shortcoming of TRAC was lack of full extensibility: some TRAC primitive functions are sensitive to the distinction between a null (zero character) argument and a nonexistent (non delimited) one, but beyond its last non null argument, a user defined function cannot make the distinction. SAM76 was a TRAC like language which eliminated that limitation. Russ Nelson implemented an emacs extension language named MINT (MINT Is Not TRAC). This language is used by the FreeDOS editor FreeMACS. John Walker (programmer) implemented an embeddable extension language library DIESEL (Dumb Interpretively Evaluated String Expression Language) originally for menu macro processing in AutoCAD. TRAC was used by FTP Software in its PC/TCP product as the modem dialer scripting language. TRAC was also used as a front end on Digital Productions Cray renderer for films, including The Last Starfighter.