TRAC (64) Interpreter in JavaScript

Link to the actual "etude" https://archive.org/details/wetherell-etudes-for-programmers... (Wetherell has a number of small, interesting programming "etudes", one of is to write a TRAC interpreter.)

Some background. Calvin Mooers developed TRAC - the programming language - in the 1960s for "duffers", that is, people who were not computer scientists.

(A phrase he used in the writing of the time was "duffers", though I don't know if he specifically applied it to TRAC users.)

It was the first homoiconic language. There were a group of teens interested in programming that hung out with Mooers. One of these was L Peter Deutsch, who at 18 (and a year after writing LISP 1.5 for the PDP-1) helped develop the TRAC language and wrote the first TRAC implementation. Deutsch later implemented Ghostscript.

About 10 years later, Ted Nelson's "Computer Libs" suggested TRAC as one of the first three programming languages to start with. This made people more widely aware of TRAC, and of course people did their own implementations, as seen in this link.

Mooers, though, was very protective about what was "his." He pushed for software copyright production back in the 1960s. The best he could do was trademark the term "TRAC", and send cease&desist letters when someone used it. See this article from the first issue of Dr. Dobbs: https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01/page/n12...

I talked with someone who had met one of Mooers' daughters around Cambridge. He knew Mooers was, and had (as I call) a copy of Computer Lib with him. He got invited to dinner with the Mooers family. All went well, until he revealed he had written a version of TRAC for himself. This was a sore point. Mooers got up and left. He wife commented that Mooers didn't like others playing with his toys.