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Well this program proves what I said: it uses "late binding", then uses an undocumented "linking" step to try resolving the references:

- I don't know what it does really, but if it allows using any candidate, that it will enumerate all possible solutions, by explictly instanciating all the possible bindings, so this will still effectively a linking step, applied to each instance.

- If it just randomly select one candidate, then the results are unpredictable, and the language itself has NO practival use, it is fundamentally flawed, unsecure, non-portable at all: an implementation of the language will necessrily have to make arbitrary choices... and document them! This will create as many distinct "formal" languages as there are arbitrary choices, even if all of them use the same basic syntax. Such language is not formal, it is then actually a (possibly very large) family of languages with distinct applications working only for one of its instances.

Still we are back to the final linking step which is necessarily deterministic (otherwise it is not implementable at all an any deterministic computer or Turing machine, this informal language would be a "blackbox", an "oracle", we could refer by "only God knows").



Le mer. 21 nov. 2018 à 21:23, Sean Conner <sean@conman.org> a écrit :
It was thus said that the Great Philippe Verdy once stated:
> I cannot even find any reference about INRAC on the net. All I find is the
> acronym and brand in France of the "Institut National pour la Retraite
> ACtive", a training institute for senior people.
>
> I find a reference in GitHub for the name of a module written in Perl for
> reverse engineering of RAC files used in the early 1980s by the RACTER
> program, used for chatting, an ancestor of IRC... But I don't know if you
> refer to this Perl module and its related language. This is an alpha
> module, not tested, not even documented.

  Congratulations!  RACTER was, in fact, written in INRAC and was
commercially available in tthe mid 80s [1][2].  The RAC files *is* the
program, and the language itself is non-deterministic in resolving names
which I gave as an example to back up the point Viacheslav Usov was making.

  -spc

[1]     It was even used in the writing of the book _The Policemans' Beard
        is Half Constructed_ (https://www.amazon.com/Policemans-Beard-Half-Constructed-Computer/dp/0446380512/)

[2]     The INRAC compiler was also available commercially, but is hard to
        find.