TRAC (programming language)

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TRAC (for Text Reckoning And Compiling) Language is a programming language developed between 1959–1964 by Calvin Mooers and first implemented on the PDP-1 in 1964 by L. Peter Deutsch.[ 4] It was one of three "first languages" recommended by Ted Nelson in Computer Lib. TRAC T64 was used until at least 1984, when Mooers updated it to TRAC T84.[ 4]

TRAC is a purely text-based language — a kind of macro language. Unlike traditional ad hoc macro languages of the time, such as those found in assemblers, TRAC is well planned, consistent, and in many senses complete[fact or opinion? ]. It has explicit input and output operators, unlike the typical implicit I/O at the outermost macro level, which makes it simultaneously simpler and more versatile[vague ] than older macro languages.

TRAC is a text-processing language,[ 5] also called a string processing language.[ 6] Because of this the only data type available is a string of characters. Numbers are strings of digits, with integer arithmetic (without specific limits on maximum values) being provided through built-in ("primitive") functions which operate on their string representation. Arguably, one aspect of its completeness is that the concept of an error is limited to events like lack of file space and requesting expansion of a string longer than the interpreter's working storage; what would in many languages be described as illegal operations are dealt with in TRAC by defining a result (often a null string) for every possible combination of a function's argument strings.