A SHORT HISTORY OF THE T3X LANGUAGE

	T3X is a tiny block-structured language that you probably
	haven't heard about. It had a tiny community back in the
	mid-1990's. Software written in T3X includes its own compiler
	(of course), its own text-based IDE, a few LISP interpreters,
	an assembler and linker for the 8086, and a database system
	used by a local church community. It was also used in a few
	college courses, most probably because its community was so
	tiny that nobody could be bothered to do your homework
	assignments for you.

	The T3X language started as a very minimalistic language
	with a single-file compiler that targeted the 8086 and 386
	processors. It supported FreeBSD via the GNU binutils and
	emitted DOS EXE files through its own assembler and linker.

	In its lifetime, several enhancements were made to both the
	language and its implementation:

	- An object system was added to the language, and the entire
	  runtime support infrastructure was rewritten as a set of
	  classes.
	- Tcode, an abstract target language, was added. It could be
	  interpreted, optimized, linked, and converted to native
	  code.
	- A back-end for the AXP 21064 (Alpha) was added.
	- A C back-end was added, allowing to use T3X on otherwise
	  unsupported processors.
	- Runtime support for the following platforms was added:
	  NetBSD-386, NetBSD-Alpha, FreeBSD-386, Coherent-386,
	  Linux-386, and Plan 9 (via C).

	T3X is probably notable, because it is a typeless object
	oriented language. Objects are distinguished by the methods
	they implement, and the methods are typeless procedures.
	The T3X object system is more similar to ADA packages than
	to the C++ or Java approach. It implements reusable modules
	rather than data types.

	T3X-8.1.7 was the last version of T3X and it was released in
	2004 with some minor updates in 2011 and 2014. Its generic
	(Tcode) port still runs on modern operating systems.

	T3X9 is a subset of the T3X language that compiles directly
	from T3X to ELF-FreeBSD-386.

	If you are familiar with T3X, this is what the compiler omits
	from the original language: modules, objects, classes, packed
	vectors, function pointers and indirect function calls, meta
	commands, unsigned operators. Also, constant expression syntax
	is only a subset.

	The T3X9 compiler is under 1600 lines in size and compiles
	itself from source to ELF in about 0.06 seconds on a 750MHz
	notebook computer. The resulting binary has a size of less
	than 32K bytes. The T3X9r2 compiler has a slightly larger
	size (about 33K bytes) and additional language constructs
	(packed tables, hex literal prefixes) and runtime functions.