3 Mar
2005
3 Mar
'05
10:14 a.m.
On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Steve Jones wrote:
My friend is a board member for the TRAC Foundation.
TRAC is
"an interpretive, recursive, string-based, macroprocessing
language with no compile step" invented by Calvin Mooers
starting in 1959. Going to www.tracfoundation.com one finds
that "entire subroutines can be inserted, or deleted, from
a running procedure, thus massively changing the behavior
during runtime." Whoa! Imagine changing a sort routine half
way through a long running job...
The reason I mention TRAC is that there's a chance one
of these packs has important/useful information about the
TRAC language, and my friend would really appreciate it if
the new owner could check for and recover anything that's
on these.
But won't Mooers sue him if the recoverer even looks at the
code?!! TRAC certainly died from Mooer's silly legal ideas (he
copyrighted or otherwise restricted the language syntax or
something) and from the looks of the language, would not have
lasted past 1975 much anyways, it's quite second-generation.
Not that I don't think recovering it will be tres f'ing cool.
Will us mortals get to see it though? Or will it end up packratted
away from info theives?
Other than big coverage in COMPUTER LIB/DREAM MACHINES and some
other papers and such, I never could see what all the fuss was
about, though it makes it fascinating today in another sort of
way.