The current state of the PSTricks project
PSTricks is an abbreviation for PostScript Tricks and uses the enormous graphical capabilities of the old programming language PostScript. It is a so-called page code language (PCL) which is distributed since 1984 by Adobe Systems. PostScript is fully Turing compatible and a stack-oriented programming language, like Assembler, Forth, Hewlett Packard pocket calculators, et al. PDF is derived from PostScript, with some important extensions but without the possibility of mathematical calculations.