🚀 go-pugleaf

TRAC was first documented in an article in the CACM in about 1965 by Cal
Mooers and Peter Deutsch.  He later printed up some defining documents
under the imprint of Rockford Research, Mooers' little company.  Rockford
Research is long gone, but maybe Mooers still has copies. I've been
meaning to get back in touch with him, since he lives about three blocks
from here.

Trac is an interesting language for several reasons.  Technically, it is
the only macro-generator I've ever seen that makes a clean distinction
between macro scanning and expansion on the one hand and I/O on the other.
On the legal front, Trac was the first language where someone used
trademark law to try to regulate the quality of implementations by not
letting people use the trademark unless the implementation was up to
snuff.  This predated the DOD's use of the Ada trademark by about 20
years.  (The first trademarked language name was Fortran, but IBM gave up
the trademark before 1960 and never made the use of the name an issue.)

There were lots of Trac intepreters over the years.  I worked on two of
them with Peter Eichenberger before 1970.  One was for the PDP-10,
originally with the RESISTORS, and later at Yale, where as an
undergraduate I used it to prototype an APL to Basic compiler in 1972
(which I later learned was at the time probably state-of-the-art) and to
write what may have been the first outlining word processor which I used
to write my PhD thesis.  We also did a PDP-11 Trac processor which Peter
spiffed up as a summer student at Western Electric and may have been given
to DECUS.  Other notable Trac processors include Deutch's original PDP-1
version, one that Mooers' did for the PDP-10, and Claude Kagan's greatly
expanded version for the PDP-8, PDP-10, and later Z-80 (they shared
considerable source code, using a lot of macros.)  The Z-80 version turned
into sam76 when Kagan had a falling out with Mooers.  Kagan usually used
his middle names Anselme Roichel on sam76 documentation to avoid giving
the erroneous impression that the sam76 work was related to his day job at
Western Electric research.

Preston Briggs at Rice (preston@rice.edu) whipped up a little Trac
interpreter about a year ago which he would probably be happy to give
away.

Regards,
John Levine, comp.compilers moderator
johnl@iecc.cambridge.ma.us or {spdcc|ima|world}!iecc!johnl