User talk:Jerzy/Top Arc TRAC

Nice to see TRAC article getting filled out...
...I couldn't write any more myself since I have no reference material other than thirty-year-old, wait, make that forty-year-old recollections of playing with the language for a few days.

IF possible, what I would most like to see added to this article would be just a couple of examples of what the language looked like (an example of a simple macro expansion), and perhaps a brief explanation of the difference between \ expansion and \\ expansion. (Or was it / and // ?).


 * Noted by Jerzy(t) 04:54, 2004 Jul 16 (UTC), the above 2 'graphs have this history entry:
 * 19:55, 2004 Mar 22 Dpbsmith (Nice to see TRAC article getting filled out...)


 * Hope you're watchlisting me now, and that i don't need to look at the history to know how to reply to you in the absense of a sig, but i'll try to remember to do so if you don't reply soon.


 * Wow, i have no idea what you mean by
 * the difference between \ expansion and \\ expansion. (Or was it / and // ?).
 * and i wonder if one of us was using a non-standard implementation. Could the slashes reflect a difference between dialects; hmm, wait a minit, nothing to take back, but i was about to say
 * / vs. (
 * but now i want to say
 * / vs. #
 * Does than ring any bells? One and two were, i think, expansions that get rescanned immediately and the other not; i don't find the terminology i'm about to use familiar, but think its a sound one reflecting necessary implementation: # or ## controlling whether the expansion is inserted in the working string to the left or right of the "expansion cursor".  (I'm a little uneasy about that, bcz i think this cursor jumps around as the interpreter pops nested functions off the stack, and i can't picture that process at the moment.)


 * I bet i have some serious TRAC code around somewhere, in a box of tab-paper (including the TRAC pretty-print program that i built on top of someone's (hmm, Leonidas Jones's) paren-nesting-display program).
 * Hmm.
 * # (DS,howdy,Hello World!)##(howdy)
 * How's that look? -- not the most trivial implementation, but IIRC the minimal interesting one.
 * OK, i looked at the comma that's now parenthesized, and i want to say
 * Active function: #(DS....
 * Inactive function: ##(howdy)
 * Protected function:
 * Any bells?

--Jerzy(t) 20:41, 2004 Mar 22 (UTC)

TRAC article: wikipedia not a web index
danakil Hi, Jerzy. I'm glad you noticed this change as I had to do it on purpose to draw somebody's attention. Let me explain. A local admin (User:Stan Shebs) did just the same thing with the NGL article, whose original (and still sole) link was to the NGL programming language. I noted that we should wait until there were actual articles for the potential other meanings, but he reverted me rather unpolitely (Don't even think of undoing another TLA disambig page again - deleting other people's additions like that is called vandalism around here, and can get you banned. Stan 17:43, 25 Aug 2004 (UTC)). This is not the first issue that several of us in the prog lang context have had with him (please refer to Talk:List of programming languages). In any case, would you please consider fixing NGL just as you've fixed TRAC? Wish you a good day. &mdash; danakil 03:12, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)~
 * Thanks, Jerzy. Commenting on your points:
 * I do not recall having described Stan's position, as far as I can see, I limited myself to offering links to the relevant discussions.
 * I am not counting you on my side, as I don't want to have a "side". I only asked you if you would consider doing with the NGL article the same thing you had just done with the TRAC one.
 * I am not here to socialize, but nevertheless, I have remained cool and respectful while a couple of others haven't (see User:Stan Shebs first comment to me, above on this page, he hadn't even taken care of checking out whether or not I had written any content articles). Outside of those two people, the interaction with my Wikipedian colleagues has been very rewarding.
 * No. I have not gotten myself into the position where I can't/don't-want-to defend my own work: the edit I made to the TRAC article is perfectly valid under the light of my reasoning that there should always be a disambig page for prog lang names that refers to the base article named along the [LangName programming language]] pattern. The only thing left to do was to immediately create one of the other 'TRAC' articles. So I stand behind my actions.
 * Thanks for the time you take to look upon the situation. Of course I know there is no assurance. And, in fact, the NGL article issue is not a big deal at all, rather, the problem I see is that sysops are supposed to show more tactful/neutral behaviour than the one I've been experimenting.
 * I am not looking for trouble.
 * No. I had already read most of the documents you mention before I joined Wikipedia as a named member. Besides, I believe I am making a significant number of positive contributions in the area of programming languages and, also, in that of the mesoamerican natural languages. It is not a month that I've begun to edit, and I'm currently ranked 618. Plus I have created a good number of prog lang related articles and practically re-built the Category:Programming languages.
 * Don't worry about me feeling let down: I won't. I'am aware of the rights/limitations of sysops.
 * Thanks again for your kind attention. Have a good day. &mdash; danakil 05:04, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)

More on TRAC: a data structured language?
tk J, Regrettably, I have no phone booth into which to duck and change into SuperWPian. For reasons I've never quite understood in detail, I am logged off on occasion, generally without my noticing. Any edits thereafter are indeed ascribed to some IP addr or another. Since I haven't bothered to keep track of any of this, I suppose I could convert all those 'forcibly anonymous' edits to me.

As for the data structured quality of TRAC, this was based on my memory of TRAC from some decades ago. It is unusual as languages go, not only in its particular history and very close identification with CM, but also in its approach to programming. Including self-modifying code. Among the aspects I rememberd was this LISPish perspective, and when I encountered the language list, I put TRAC in with LISP. You are of course, free to move either to some other rubric. Given the multidimensional ways it's possible to classify such languages, no single classification is likely to be satisfactory to all. ww 15:48, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)