Track programming language

TRAC programming language was originally designed and implemented by Calvin N. Mooers in the early 1960's to be used in fields such as artificial intelligence and information retrieval. TRAC is an extremely light weight interpreted language that acts on character strings using a nested syntax.

TRAC is an interpretive, recursive, string-based, macroprocessing language with no compile step.

The language employs a single data type, strings of eight bit byte <octet> characters. Strings are treated interchangeably as both data and executable expressions. Actions in TRAC are commanded by primitive expressions in a mathematical function form. After execution, each primitive is replaced by the value string resulting from its execution, giving TRAC its recursive structure.

TRAC language is highly interactive, and entire subroutines can be inserted, or deleted, from a running procedure, thus massively changing the behavior during runtime. TRAC macros can call other macros, generate and define new macros, or delete other macros, with no limit to the depth of calls.

TRAC arithmetic is decimal and integer only, and the numerical representation is by strings of digits represented in the US-ASCII character set. From this base, other numeric types can be constructed by means of TRAC language procedures.