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From: doug@terak.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.research,net.lang,net.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: String reduction
Message-ID: <1142@terak.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 24-Apr-86 11:03:06 EDT
Article-I.D.: terak.1142
Posted: Thu Apr 24 11:03:06 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 27-Apr-86 05:49:10 EDT
References: <1031@eagle.ukc.ac.uk> <994@umn-cs.UUCP> <404@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu>
Organization: Calcomp Display Products Division, Scottsdale, AZ, USA
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> TRAC is pretty easy to implement; I have an incomplete version written in
> C that I did some years back.  I also have a paper on TRAC which is probably
> long out of print by now.

If anyone cares, TRAC stands for Text Reckoner And Compiler, and is
trademarked.

It is discussed at some length in Peter Wegner's book, "Data Structures,
Information Processing and Machine Organization" (the title may be off
a bit, the book is at home and it's hard to remember such a lengthy
title :-)

Stanford used to have a version they called WYMPI.  The main differences
were the use of "*" instead of "#" and -- more significantly -- they
permitted string (macro) names to be specified as the operator, rather
than requiring as TRAC does that strings be specifically called with
the "cl" operator.  In other words, you could say *(macro,...) instead
of #(cl,macro,...).  Wegner leaves it as an exercise to the reader to
show why the "cl" was an important architectural feature of TRAC which
shouldn't have been tampered with.  Something about trying to make
#(cl,macro,...) == #(macro,...)   and at the same time making
##(cl,macro,...) == ##(macro,...)
-- 
Doug Pardee -- CalComp -- {elrond,seismo,decvax,ihnp4}!terak!doug