TRAC

TRAC is is an interpreted, interactive, ultra-light-weight programming language which has been in use since 1964. It shares its everything is a string concept with Tcl, and is also the first language to feature command substitution, making it one of the forebearers of Tcl.

Description

In the history of programming languages, one aspect that stands out is that they registered the name of the programming language as a trademark, which gave them some control over implementations.

Larry Smith: A source archive of tint (Tint Is Not Trac) a Trac-64 (I think) implementation, if anyone wants it can be had at: http://tintware.sourceforge.net/Download.html . I also have html files documenting several versions of Trac, including the Trac84 version. And, if anyone cares, "Tinker" is actually a Trac interpreter modified to use Tcl syntax, it's available in my ancient ctools code, based on the html file "TRAC, A Procedure-Describing Language for the Reactive Typewriter". I also have an essentially unscannable collection of loose pages comprising documentation for "Sam76" a greatly extended version of Trac written for the Z-80 under CP/M, but I don't expect that will be useful for anyone. You can find a runnable version of it at http://www.resistors.org/sam76.html , though. I'll see if I can upload the html files talking about Trac and its internals at Trac Implementation.

Implementations

trac2001
An implementation of TRACK in Java

Reference

The Programming Languages LISP and TRAC , E. L. van der Poel, 1972
The RESISTORS and Trac
RESISTORS was one of the first computer clubs for young people, founded in 1967 in central New Jersey
Prehistory of esoteric programming languages
TRAC had the peculiar property that programs diddled themselves until they were the answer.

See Also

Playing TRAC
Trac Implementation
a dump by Larry Smith of TRAC documentation