Designed and developed by Jonathan A. Rees, Norman I. Adams, and Kent M. Pitman in the early 1980s, T is a dialect of the Scheme programming language.
Created as an experiment in language design and implementation, its purpose was to test the thesis developed by Guy L. Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman in their series of papers about Scheme, that it could be used as the basis for a practical programming language of exceptional expressive power, and that implementations of Scheme could perform better than other Lisp systems, competing with implementations of other programming languages, such as C and BLISS.
While based on Scheme, EuLisp and Joule also influenced the language, and it includes some features that are lacking in Scheme. For example, T is object-oriented and has first-class environments, known as locales, which can be modified non-locally and used as a module system. T also has several extra special forms for lazy evaluation and flow control, as well as an equivalent to Common Lisp's setf. Like Scheme, T supports call-with-current-continuation (call/cc), although it has a more limited form called catch.
T has been ported to several hardware platforms and operating systems, including MIPS, Motorola 68000, NS320xx, and SPARC.
T was first released in 1982, and its final release was on August 1, 1984. Although it has not been under active development in the past forty years, it is still not a defunct language.
Recommended Resources
CodeDocs: T (programming language)
Hosted on CodeDocs, which provides tutorials, documentation, and references for several programming languages (including the T language) and technologies, at various experience levels. Its section on the T programming language identifies its paradigm, family, designers and developers, dates, and influences, along with a brief introduction to the language, its rationale, ports, references, and links to the official language site and additional online resources.
https://codedocs.org/what-is/t-programming-language
On this page, Paul Graham republishes a history of the T programming language attributed to Olin Shivers, describing it as "one of the best Lisp implementations. The history begins around 1981-1982, at the Yale Computer Science Department's AI group, led by Roger Schank, who hired Jonathan Rees, an undergraduate, to implement the new Lisp implementation, along with the story of how the others became involved, and subsequent development of the T implementation of Lisp.
https://paulgraham.com/thist.html
T Programming Introduction Course
Kvaser supplies CAN solutions to engineers designing and deploying systems in a wide variety of industries. The Kavaser website features an online programming course on the T programming language, which can be used to customize Kvaser devices. T programming allows technical users to write a C-like program that takes control of the embedded processor within the Kvaser device, and TRX, an IDE, is also available, along with a T language guide and other training materials.
https://www.kvaser.com/t-programming/
T Programming Language Tutorial
Published on the Computer Science page of the University of New Hampshire, this page provides a brief introduction to the T programming language, largely by example, although links are provided to the T language specifications, where more technical details are provided. T is defined as a simple object-oriented language modeled on Java, in particular, its syntax. T supports only one primitive type, the integer type, although it also supports reference types via the class Object.
https://www.cs.unh.edu/~cs712/T_tutorial.html
Created in 2004, this page serves as the official website for the T programming language. The developers and others involved in the development of the language are identified, and a photo is provided of six of them. Other resources include a timeline of the language's releases and other significant events related to the language, publications referring to the language, citations, successors, and links to other online resources, some of which are no longer valid.
http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/
