TTM is a string oriented, general purpose macro processing programming language developed in 1968 by Steven Caine and E. Kent Gordon at the California Institute of Technology.
The following description is taken from the original TTM reference manual[1] and the subsequent batch processing extension.
[2] TTM is a recursive, interpretive language designed primarily for string manipulation, text editing, macro definition and expansion, and other applications generally classified as systems programming.
[5][6] TTM was designed to have all of the power possessed by earlier general macro assemblers but with the unfortunate syntactic and semantic difficulties removed.
[7][8][9][10] During the development of TTM, it became apparent that applications other than assembler macro processing were possible.
These include data editing, text manipulation, expression compiling, and macro processing for language processors other than assemblers.
The initial version of TTM was implemented to run in a conversational manner under the Caltech Basic Time Sharing System for the IBM System/360 Model 50.
[11] Other versions have been written to run in the batch processing environment of OS/360 and to operate in front of or in conjunction with various language processors.
If the function call was prefixed by two '#' characters, then scanning resumes just after the inserted text.
For user defined functions, if too few arguments are provided, additional one are added with the value of the empty string ("").
Then the text of the dictionary entry of XX is segmented with respect to any specified arguments: "34" in this case.
However, by removing the syntactic distinction between built-in and user-defined function, TTM would appear to be a much cleaner language.