# Architecture questions closed

All five were open in `geometry-vs-code.md`. Each was closed by measurement, not
by argument.

| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| **Concurrency** — hardware threads are code, but is *ordering* geometric? | **Ordering is geometric.** Causality is a partial order (Lamport 1978); a total order is an arbitrary extension that "cannot be depended on to imply a causal relationship." Languages force a total order at authoring time, so every lock, barrier and fence is apparatus for recovering the partial order that was destroyed. CALM: a program has a coordination-free implementation **iff monotone**. What breaks monotonicity is destructive update. **Coordination is the price of forgetting.** |
| **Error handling** — does `grounded: false` cover *failed*? | **No.** Standing is a *signed* component: `>0` supported, `=0` unknown, `<0` contradicted. Not-known and known-false are opposite directions on one axis; a boolean cannot tell them apart. `inhibitory` as an int32 flag is that sign wearing a boolean. |
| **Parsing** — is a grammar a convention, or a region? | **A grammar is a basis; parsing is transduction onto it.** Lexeme→token is convention, shape recognition is a region, byte traversal is irreducible. **But the SHOULD gate refused the obvious move:** the keyword table stays code, because the set is closed by the language definition and the lexer runs before the program is understood. Same verdict as `is_digit` in ASCII. |
| **Numeric literals** — is `3` a position or a convention? | **The numeral is convention; the number is a position — and a bare `3` is a magnitude with no axis.** It is not a position until something gives it a direction, which is why `3.days` needs a calendar. Demonstrated: `t + 3` refused, `t + 1.hour` accepted. |
| **The module system** — if the partition is a neighbourhood, does linking survive? | **Premature.** The partition is a filesystem path and there is no namespacing at all. `import` is textual inlining; with a `.elh` header, symbols resolve at C link time. Two modules defining `helper` emit two C functions into one translation unit. Linking barely survives the *path* partition. |
