NASA's Shuttle language survives only as a 1980 scan. I had AI rebuild it.
The complete specification of the language NASA wrote the Space Shuttle's flight software in is a 20-megabyte bag of page images. No text layer. Some pages sit at an angle. That document is IR-542, and nothing supersedes it. If you want to know whether a bit-string partition is legal on the left of an assignment, the answer is a photograph of a page printed in 1980. I wanted HAL/S to run again —…
The specification for NASA's language used to write the Space Shuttle's flight software is a 20-megabyte collection of page images with no text layer and some pages at an angle. This document, IR-542, is the ultimate reference for determining if a bit-string partition is legal on the left of an assignment. The goal was to revive the dead HAL/S language by rebuilding its lexer, parser, type checker, and interpreter.
The obvious approach would be to run multiple OCR engines and take the majority vote, but this fails due to correlated OCR errors. Instead, pages were sorted into tiers based on how much OCR could be trusted, with Tier C requiring manual transcription and verification against the scan. The working grammar, consisting of 485 productions across pages 295-306, was completed through this process.
The AI performed OCR, despeckling, extraction, reconciliation, and assembly, while humans verified the results. Two important checks were numbering integrity and reference integrity, ensuring that no pages were dropped or duplicated, and every nonterminal on the right-hand side had a defining production or was one of 22 known lexical primitives.
With a verified grammar, the AI could build the system using ordinary compiler work, resulting in authentic Shuttle-era programs running in Rust.
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