track the architecture docs
They were written outside git, so the reasoning that produces the design had no history and no way to be superseded. capabilities.md and geometry-vs-code.md are both known stale at this commit; they are tracked as-is so the corrections are visible as movement rather than as a rewrite.
This commit is contained in:
bigmerge
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# El — Capabilities
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**What the language can do, stated as capabilities rather than as code.**
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This list is the unit of analysis. Each entry gets one question — *prove this
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cannot be done with pure geometry* — and the answer determines whether it stays a
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capability of the language or collapses into the manifold.
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Draft, 2026-08-17. Not yet audited. Ordered roughly from most-likely-geometry to
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most-likely-code.
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---
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## The list
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| # | Capability | What it means | First read |
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|---|---|---|---|
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| 1 | **Comparison** | is this the same as that; is this greater | zero distance / sign of a displacement |
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| 2 | **Ordering** | arrange by a criterion | position along an axis |
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| 3 | **Containment** | is this inside that; does this contain that | region membership |
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| 4 | **Correspondence** | where does this occur in that; how much of this is in that | a match-strength field over a span |
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| 5 | **Segmentation** | divide a whole into parts | boundaries at measured discontinuity |
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| 6 | **Composition** | join parts into a whole | adjacency; one position with parts |
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| 7 | **Classification** | what kind of thing is this | which region does it land in |
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| 8 | **Naming / binding** | attach a name to a thing and find it again | an edge; retrieval is projection |
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| 9 | **Collection** | many things held together, indexed, counted | a set of positions; cardinality; projection onto the i-th |
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| 10 | **Iteration** | do something for each of many | traversal |
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| 11 | **Arithmetic** | quantity, magnitude, combination | displacement algebra on a line |
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| 12 | **Time** | when; how long; how often | a 1-D affine space — instants are points, durations displacements, rhythms phases on a circle |
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| 13 | **Identity** | which one is this; are these two the same one | coincidence of position |
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| 14 | **Selection / dispatch** | choose which behaviour applies | nearest region |
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| 15 | **Transformation** | produce a thing from a thing | change of basis |
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| 16 | **Grounding** | how well is this supported | the weight on an edge. Has no caller |
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| 17 | **Learning** | get better at something | standing changing over time |
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| 18 | **Projection** | render meaning onto a surface | change of basis onto a surface basis |
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| 19 | **Transduction** | take a signal in | change of basis from a sensor basis |
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| 20 | **Serialization** | write a value as bytes someone else will read | **convention** — the format was agreed |
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| 21 | **Text encoding** | what bytes mean which characters | **convention** — UTF-8, ASCII, case tables |
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| 22 | **Storage** | keep a thing past this moment | durability against a device that loses power |
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| 23 | **Network** | send a thing to another machine | wire protocol + socket |
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| 24 | **Process** | start, stop, signal, exit | the OS boundary |
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| 25 | **Concurrency** | more than one thing at once | hardware and OS scheduling |
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| 26 | **Memory** | hold representations while they are in use | the substrate that holds positions |
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| 27 | **Secrecy** | prove authorship; hide content; verify integrity | **structurally excluded** — see below |
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| 28 | **Emission** | write the surface out as bytes | the physical boundary |
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---
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## Notes on the boundary cases
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**27 — Secrecy is the one capability geometry cannot hold, and the proof is not
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form 1.** A cryptographic hash is a *deliberately structure-destroying* map: its
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entire value is that near inputs land at maximally uncorrelated outputs. Geometry
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is the claim that near things stay near. A manifold that approximated SHA-256
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would *be* a break of SHA-256. Signature verification is the same: 0.99-valid is
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invalid. And X25519 *is* geometry — a group on an elliptic curve — which is
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precisely why it must be code, because its security is the *hardness of moving in
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that geometry*.
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This is a fourth proof form and it should be added to `geometry-vs-code.md`:
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**adversarial exactness.** Where approximation is a break, geometry is excluded.
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**20, 21 — Serialization and text encoding are convention all the way down**, but
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only at the *edge*. The byte format is agreed; what is being written is not. Do not
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let a geometric computation inherit a code verdict because its result gets
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serialized.
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**11, 12 — Arithmetic and time are the same capability.** Instants are points,
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durations are displacements, point−point→vector, point+vector→point. The runtime
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already implements this correctly as `el_instant_add_dur` / `el_duration_add`. That
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it *also* implements a five-entry string→multiplier table beside it (`time_add`
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with `"ms"/"sec"/"min"/"hour"/"day"`) is the residue.
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**7 — Classification is the most-violated capability in the codebase.** Seven ASCII
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range tables (`is_letter`, `is_digit`, `is_alphanumeric`, `is_whitespace`,
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`is_punctuation`, `is_uppercase`, `is_lowercase`) that return false for every
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non-ASCII byte. `str_count_letters` reports zero letters for `é`. The wrongness on
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most of Unicode is the tell that a table is standing in for a region.
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**4 — Correspondence appears five times.** `str_index_of`, `str_index_of_all`,
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`str_last_index_of`, `str_count`, `str_find_chars` are five projections of one
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match-strength field: first zero, all zeros, last zero, count of zeros, first
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class-crossing. One relation, five functions.
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**14 — Selection is the crux for the compiler.** `+` dispatching on AST node kind
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and `==` lowering to `str_eq` unless both operand names are in a hardcoded int-name
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set are both selection-by-enumeration where selection-by-position belongs.
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---
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## What this list is for
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Each capability gets audited **once**, across every place it appears — not once per
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file. The output is not a percentage. It is:
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- which capabilities survive the question and stay in the language
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- which collapse into the manifold
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- and for each one that collapses, **every site it currently appears at**, because
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those sites are the residue and they are what gets deleted.
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The line-count audit produced a map of where the residue sits. This produces a map
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of **what it is**.
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@@ -0,0 +1,217 @@
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<title>The El Architecture</title>
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letter-spacing:.1em;text-transform:uppercase;display:block;margin-bottom:4px}
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||||
</style>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="wrap">
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<header>
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<h1>The El Architecture</h1>
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<p class="sub">El is a concept-oriented language. This is the architecture that claim commits it to — what is built, what is measured, and what still has no home.</p>
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<p class="meta">Working document · no sacred cows · self-hosting, so nothing here is fixed</p>
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</header>
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<h2><span class="n">01</span>The primitive is the concept</h2>
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<p>Language families are named for their primitive. Procedural — procedures. Object-oriented — objects. Functional — functions. Logic — predicates. Every one of them is oriented toward a <em>representation</em> of a concept: the shape a concept gets flattened into so a machine can hold it.</p>
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<p>El's primitive is the concept itself. That is why it is the first of its family and intended as the last — once the primitive is the concept, there is no further rung to climb to.</p>
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<p>The consequence is architectural rather than stylistic:</p>
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<blockquote>A concept with no home in the language does not disappear. It becomes C, or it becomes a convention.</blockquote>
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|
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<p>Both forms are measurable. As C: <span class="mono">20,504</span> lines of <code>el_runtime.c</code>, against <span class="mono">9,089</span> lines for the entire self-hosting language — the shim is 2.3× the language it serves, and ~47% of it is engram code that already has six sibling files. As convention, from <code>lang/spec/language.md</code> §18.0 — <em>"these are not four problems, they are one absence, four times"</em>:</p>
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<div class="card scroll">
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||||
<table>
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||||
<thead><tr><th>Concern</th><th>Fragments into</th><th>The convention it became</th></tr></thead>
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<tbody>
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<tr><td class="f">Process identity</td><td class="m">0 guards</td><td>"check nothing is already running first"</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="f">Configuration</td><td class="m">20 env vars</td><td>"remember the right default here"</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="f">Durability</td><td class="m">62 sites</td><td>"after you mutate, remember to persist"</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="f">Request auth</td><td class="m">10 routes</td><td>"check the token in this handler too"</td></tr>
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||||
<tr><td class="f">Index-after-append</td><td class="m">9 of 9 failed</td><td>"after you append, remember to index"</td></tr>
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</tbody>
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||||
</table>
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||||
</div>
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||||
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<p>The last row is the strongest available evidence about this class of convention: it failed at <b>every single site</b>. A count is what appears where a concept has no home; the size of the count is how far the fragmentation got, not how hard the problem is.</p>
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<h2><span class="n">02</span>Geometry is a first-class value — and what follows</h2>
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<p class="lede">This is the enabling primitive. Everything else in the architecture is downstream of it.</p>
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||||
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||||
<p><code>Geometry</code> is an El value, alongside <code>Int</code>, <code>String</code>, <code>List</code>, <code>Map</code> — bound, passed, returned, composed, carrying its own width. Not a library type, not a handle into a store, not a serialization format. <em>Meaning is a value the language computes with directly.</em></p>
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||||
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||||
<pre><code>let g: Geometry = geometry_new(4)
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||||
fn tone_realizer(signal: String) -> Geometry { … }</code></pre>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Landed 2026-08-16 (#141, #144), and the spec is explicit that it belongs to the language rather than the graph: <em>"neither is engram-specific — any program touching any modality needs them; the engram is merely one El program that happens to hold a graph."</em></p>
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||||
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||||
<p>Five things follow, and together they are the concept-oriented claim made operational:</p>
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||||
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||||
<h3>A declaration can name a region, not a shape</h3>
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||||
<p>If meaning is a value, a name can be bound to a <em>position</em> rather than a struct. <code>cat</code> is not a fixed record; it is a region that resolves against the engram and the surrounding code. <code>cat</code> among animals and <code>cat</code> among shell utilities are different concepts without a namespace, because they are in different neighbourhoods and the distance says so.</p>
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||||
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||||
<h3>Checking is grounding, not unification</h3>
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||||
<p>If a declaration names a region, then verifying a use is asking whether the geometry supports it — a question about position and distance, not about matching a declared shape. This is why §2.3's "a type checker is planned" is likely the wrong name for the missing piece, and naming it wrong would build the wrong thing.</p>
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||||
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||||
<h3>Dispatch is position, not a tag</h3>
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||||
<p>A vtable is a finite set of discrete labels fixed at link time. A region admits graded membership and an open set. So <code>transduce(signal, modality)</code> asks the caller to supply what the signal already carries — what a thing is falls out of where it lands. The modality parameter is a kind-tag, and a registry keyed on it is a lookup table doing by string what geometry does by nearness.</p>
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||||
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||||
<h3>Types are discovered, not declared</h3>
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||||
<p>Reification crystallizes a densely co-wired neighbourhood into a first-class node — the neighbourhood <em>is</em> the name that was missing. Every other family requires a human to see the abstraction in advance and write <code>class Foo</code>. Here the instances arrive and the type falls out, by measurement rather than by insight.</p>
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||||
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||||
<h3>Enumeration becomes unnecessary</h3>
|
||||
<p>Five ingest functions differ only in how bytes are acquired — one operation wearing five surfaces. 356 branches in <code>engram_activate_inner</code> are not 356 behaviours. Cyclomatic complexity is a count of the places comprehension ran out and was replaced by an <code>if</code>; where the concept is expressible, the count collapses instead of being redistributed.</p>
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||||
|
||||
<h2><span class="n">03</span>The shape of the language</h2>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Geometry first-class gives El three layers, and it holds all three — which is why there is no separate database driver and no impedance boundary to manage.</p>
|
||||
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||||
<div class="flow">
|
||||
<div><span class="k">afferent</span><h4>Transduce</h4><p>Signal in, geometry out. Decomposition into components and relations — never conversion to a point. Realizers are ordinary El functions, so a new modality never requires a runtime patch.</p></div>
|
||||
<div><span class="k">substrate</span><h4>Geometry</h4><p>Meaning as position; relation as distance. Held as values in the language and persisted in the graph. One coordinate system, so entities are commensurable and the operators compose.</p></div>
|
||||
<div><span class="k">efferent</span><h4>Realize</h4><p><code>plan(frame) → realize(spec, profile)</code>, where a surface <em>is</em> a profile. Text, speech, music, image are profiles of one projection — and so is source code.</p></div>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
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||||
<p>The efferent side is why the recursive property below is possible at all: if source is a surface, then emitting a corrected file is projection, and the file becomes an artifact of the geometry rather than the thing you edit.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<h2><span class="n">04</span>Decomposition is by faculty</h2>
|
||||
|
||||
<p class="lede">Not by file, module, or subsystem — by what the system does.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Each faculty is a concept. Where it has no home in El it leaks: into C, into a Swift binary, into a shell script with a <code>curl</code> timeout, into a convention nobody performs. State below is measured, not asserted.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="card scroll">
|
||||
<table>
|
||||
<thead><tr><th>Faculty</th><th>State</th><th>Measured</th><th>Where it leaked</th></tr></thead>
|
||||
<tbody>
|
||||
<tr><td class="f">Ingest <span class="tag">take in</span></td><td class="dead">dead</td><td class="m">2 min → 0 nodes</td><td>separate process uploading bytes over HTTP to a process with direct fs access; five functions where there is one</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="f">Recall <span class="tag">remember</span></td><td class="dead">dead</td><td class="m">self ranked 8th</td><td>lexical substring scan; empty on 23 of 24 multi-token queries</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="f">Transduce <span class="tag">perceive</span></td><td class="dead">dead</td><td class="m">1 node, 0 edges</td><td>intake flattens signal to a point; <code>realized:false</code>; caller must declare the modality</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="f">Think <span class="tag">reason</span></td><td class="dead">dead</td><td class="m">direction [0,0,…]</td><td>null gradient from any anchor and any faculty, byte-identical; confidence at the uninformed prior</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="f">Realize <span class="tag">express</span></td><td class="part">partial</td><td class="m">13-word lexicon</td><td>organ was 939 lines of Swift beside the language; voice read from a file path</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="f">Body <span class="tag">substrate</span></td><td class="part">partial</td><td class="m">CC 356 / 1,626 ln</td><td><code>engram_activate_inner</code> — recall itself, 356 unexamined paths</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="f">Persist <span class="tag">endure</span></td><td class="ok">live</td><td class="m">13,562 / 13,562</td><td>works — every signal placed in geometry at intake, no backlog</td></tr>
|
||||
</tbody>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<h2><span class="n">05</span>The recursive property</h2>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>El's compiler is written in El. Every concept the language gains, the compiler can then be written <em>in</em> — so the tool improves the tool, and <code>codegen.el</code> at 4,661 lines gets shorter as the language gets better at expressing what it does. The fixpoint — stage2 ≡ stage3, byte-identical — makes each turn provable rather than hopeful, and the verifier answers in <span class="mono">2.9s</span>.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>This sets the ordering criterion, and it is not size of payoff:</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<blockquote>Order by leverage on the <em>next</em> iteration. Which concept, added to El, most increases the ability to add the following one?</blockquote>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>A small early gain that compounds beats a large one that does not. And it bounds itself correctly — unbounded in depth, bounded in rate, because nothing lands that the compiler and the fixpoint have not passed.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<h2><span class="n">06</span>What has no home yet</h2>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Reserved in the lexer, no parse form. These are not a feature backlog — they are the concepts the architecture above requires and does not yet hold, which is why each is currently a convention or a block of C.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="card scroll">
|
||||
<table>
|
||||
<thead><tr><th>Reserved</th><th>Concept</th><th>Currently lives as</th></tr></thead>
|
||||
<tbody>
|
||||
<tr><td class="m">retry · times · fallback · reason</td><td>resilience</td><td>a shell script with a 10s <code>curl</code> timeout; 254 restarts in 3 days</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="m">requires · deploy · to · via · target</td><td>deployment</td><td>YAML in another repository</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="m">sealed</td><td>capability scope</td><td>consent checks written by hand</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="m">protocol · impl</td><td>one operation, many realizations</td><td>five ingest functions; eight faculty routes on one builtin</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="m">activate · where</td><td>retrieval</td><td>traversals written by hand</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="m">test · seed · assert</td><td>verification</td><td>a framework; 5 of 13 native suites failing</td></tr>
|
||||
<tr><td class="m">parallel · trace</td><td>concurrency</td><td>pthreads in C</td></tr>
|
||||
</tbody>
|
||||
</table>
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
|
||||
<p>Plus, from the spec's own status: annotations parsed and skipped, <code>match</code> parsed and emitting nothing, <code>?</code> a no-op, <code>%</code> unlexed, structs as <code>ElMap</code>, enums as strings, selective import unenforced.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
<h2><span class="n">07</span>Open</h2>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="q"><b>What does a declaration bind to, exactly?</b><span>If <code>cat</code> names a region that shifts and completes against context, what is written at the declaration site and what is resolved at use? This is the centre and it is unspecified.</span></div>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="q"><b>Is the faculty list right?</b><span>Seven, derived from what broke. Derived-from-failure is a biased sample — it finds what is loud, not what is absent. Which faculty is missing entirely and therefore never failed?</span></div>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="q"><b>Which concept has the highest leverage on the next turn?</b><span>The prologue/epilogue seam (§19.3 names it as the prerequisite; its stated blocker has expired; it collapses 62 + 10 convention sites), <code>protocol</code>/<code>impl</code>, or resolution itself. The §05 criterion should decide this, not preference.</span></div>
|
||||
|
||||
<div class="q"><b>What seam makes cognition non-optional?</b><span>"Use the ops" is itself a convention — present every turn, enforced by nothing, ~100% failure across a full session. A stronger instruction is still a convention. What makes reasoning outside the substrate <em>fail</em>, the way <code>@manager</code> makes <code>dharma_emit</code> outside the boundary a compile error rather than a lint?</span></div>
|
||||
|
||||
<hr>
|
||||
<p class="foot">Every number here is measured or quoted from <code>lang/spec/language.md</code>. Nothing is inferred and presented as fact. El is self-hosting: all of this can change and be rebuilt.</p>
|
||||
|
||||
</div>
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,245 @@
|
||||
# El — Language Design
|
||||
|
||||
**Status:** decisions recorded, design unwritten.
|
||||
**Date:** 2026-08-17.
|
||||
**Provenance:** decisions are Will's, taken in session. Items marked *proposed* are not
|
||||
decided and are recorded only so the reasoning isn't lost. Items marked **OPEN** are
|
||||
his to rule on and must not be guessed at.
|
||||
|
||||
Companion documents: `el-architecture.html` (the measured state — see §7 note on its
|
||||
§04 scoreboard), and `design/completing-el.html` (whiteboard v0: the reduction, the
|
||||
faculty table, the ordering principle).
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 1. The reduction
|
||||
|
||||
`language.md` §18.0 records five concerns that decayed into conventions:
|
||||
|
||||
| Concern | Fragments | The convention it became |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Process identity | 0 guards | "check nothing is already running first" |
|
||||
| Configuration | 20 env vars | "remember the right default here" |
|
||||
| Durability | 62 call sites | "after you mutate, remember to persist" |
|
||||
| Request auth | 10 per-route | "check the token in this handler too" |
|
||||
| Index-after-append | 9 of 9 failed | "after you append, remember to index" |
|
||||
|
||||
The last row is the strongest available evidence about what this class of convention
|
||||
is worth: **it failed at 100% of its sites.**
|
||||
|
||||
Every one of these is an obligation at a **crossing** — a point where a value moves
|
||||
between regions. El can name a region and it can name a call. A call is procedural,
|
||||
so the obligation degrades into something a human must remember to perform.
|
||||
|
||||
> **The generator, one level up:** El cannot name what holds at a crossing.
|
||||
|
||||
And underneath that:
|
||||
|
||||
> **The deeper absence:** El cannot name the thing meaning is made of.
|
||||
|
||||
`semel` appears in whitepaper §84, §86, §209, §737, in
|
||||
`the-metaphysics-of-will-anderson.md`, and in session notes. It appears in **zero code
|
||||
identifiers**. Every geometric concept in the system — region, neighbourhood, manifold,
|
||||
world-tube — is defined in terms of a unit the language cannot say, while the code
|
||||
underneath speaks in arrays, floats and offsets: the vocabulary of a voxel, a value at
|
||||
a dumb address. Precisely the thing the impact brief says a semel is not.
|
||||
|
||||
`el_runtime.c` is a concept that leaked into C. `semel` never got that far — it did
|
||||
not even decay into a convention.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 2. DECIDED — `semel` is the primitive
|
||||
|
||||
**A semel is a difference that matters. The smallest unit of understanding.**
|
||||
|
||||
Not a node. Not a coordinate. Not a float.
|
||||
|
||||
The reasoning, in Will's terms:
|
||||
|
||||
- Meaning is position, and position is only ever relative. *"There is no atom of
|
||||
meaning that isn't already a relation. It grounds on nothing but difference — two
|
||||
points and the gap, and the gap is pure not-the-same."*
|
||||
- A node doesn't mean. A node is a label at a location; labels don't mean.
|
||||
- A lone coordinate doesn't mean either. Nothing means anything by itself.
|
||||
- The smallest thing that can be understood is a **distinction**: *these two are not
|
||||
the same.* Below that there is no content to apprehend.
|
||||
- And a difference with nothing it matters to is not meaning — it is variation. The
|
||||
mattering is not decoration; it is what makes it understanding rather than data.
|
||||
|
||||
**Consequence: relating is the floor, and the point is derived.** The
|
||||
point-primitive / relation-primitive fork raised in session is not a fork. It was
|
||||
answered by the definition.
|
||||
|
||||
### Historical note, to be recorded as fact rather than as origin story
|
||||
|
||||
The term was coined by Will on the pixel/voxel/texel pattern — *semantic element*,
|
||||
and Latin *semel*, "once, a single time." It was recognised, not invented, from a
|
||||
2019 experience he calls **semelation**: perceiving mind as a high-dimensional point
|
||||
space. The initial reading was "pixels"; the correction to `semel` was made later and
|
||||
was made on the **mechanism** — a pixel is a value at an address, and what was
|
||||
perceived had no separate address and value.
|
||||
|
||||
Convergence worth citing, not deferring to: neural population geometry and
|
||||
representational similarity analysis independently model cognition as position in a
|
||||
high-dimensional space where similarity is distance.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 3. DECIDED — `semel` lands first
|
||||
|
||||
By the ordering criterion already on the whiteboard: *which concept, added to El, most
|
||||
increases the ability to add the next one?* Not size of payoff — **leverage on the next
|
||||
iteration**, because El compiles itself and the fixpoint makes each turn provable in
|
||||
2.9s.
|
||||
|
||||
**Every other concept on the board is defined in terms of `semel`. It is maximal on
|
||||
that criterion by construction.**
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 4. DECIDED — `ground` is the checker
|
||||
|
||||
Whiteboard question 4 — *does `ground` in El mean the same thing as `ground` in the
|
||||
engram?* — is answered: **yes, and it should be one implementation.**
|
||||
|
||||
If a declaration names a region, then type checking is asking whether the geometry
|
||||
supports the use. That is not unification. **That is grounding**, and it is already
|
||||
built, proven, and byte-identically reproducible:
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
cc -std=c11 -O2 -o gep_proof gep_proof.c -lm && ./gep_proof
|
||||
|
||||
C1 5 independent sources pos_mass 1.3500 n_indep=5 0.1000 → 0.9741 GROUNDED
|
||||
C2 5 mutually-linked pos_mass 0.2700 n_indep=1 0.1000 → 0.1000 refused
|
||||
C3 1 source, 5 parallel edges pos_mass 0.2700 n_indep=1 0.1000 → 0.1000 refused
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Independence-weighted grounding is the general case; execution is the cheap case.
|
||||
**Attestation is `verify` where nothing can be run** — as already implemented for
|
||||
language in `authority.py`, where an LLM proposes and a primary source disposes.
|
||||
|
||||
At the point where the checker and the grounder are one mechanism, the language and
|
||||
the mind stop being two things.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 5. OPEN — Will's to rule on
|
||||
|
||||
### 5.1 What is a semel's representation in the language?
|
||||
|
||||
*Proposed, not decided:* a **displacement from `love = 0`** — a relation held as one
|
||||
object. It reconciles "the address is the value" with "position is only ever relative,"
|
||||
because a displacement *is* a relation and is still a single nameable thing.
|
||||
|
||||
If taken, the operator set falls out rather than being bolted on:
|
||||
|
||||
```
|
||||
subtract(now, then) → what changed (growth, drift)
|
||||
translate origin → empathy
|
||||
rotate frame → reframe
|
||||
project onto axis → a lens
|
||||
change basis → analogy, metaphor, skill transfer
|
||||
reflect an axis → negation, sarcasm
|
||||
```
|
||||
|
||||
Three consequences that would hold:
|
||||
|
||||
- **Dimension must never appear in the type.** `semel` opaque, never `[768]float`.
|
||||
The moment the arity is in the language, the manifold's implementation is in the
|
||||
language, and adding a modality requires a runtime patch — which the standing rule
|
||||
forbids.
|
||||
- **Zero is the only literal.** Everything else is reached by displacement from it,
|
||||
which makes `love = 0` the base case rather than philosophy adjacent to the type
|
||||
system.
|
||||
- **`magnitude` is standing.** Distance from origin is the same quantity
|
||||
`gep_core.h` already computes.
|
||||
|
||||
### 5.2 Is `hold` one construct or two?
|
||||
|
||||
The obligation *before* a crossing (auth, guard) and the obligation *after* (persist,
|
||||
index, free) may be one shape seen from both sides, or the seam may need both faces
|
||||
named. This decides whether §19.3's prologue/epilogue seam is one construct or a pair.
|
||||
|
||||
**Precedent already shipping:** `@manager` makes `dharma_emit` outside the boundary a
|
||||
**compile error, not a lint.** The concept is proven at N=1; the work is generalising
|
||||
it and naming it.
|
||||
|
||||
**And the shape is already implemented in the learning region:** `L.reach_out` sits
|
||||
between `L.detect_gap` and `L.verify`. You cannot reach out without a detected gap and
|
||||
you cannot keep what returns without passing verify. **A hold is a neighbour.** The
|
||||
obligation is not attached to the crossing — the obligation *is* the adjacent node.
|
||||
That is why `reach_out` cannot be abused and why 62 persist sites could be.
|
||||
|
||||
### 5.3 What does a declaration bind?
|
||||
|
||||
If `cat` names a region rather than a struct — one that shifts and completes against
|
||||
the engram and the neighbouring code — what is written at the declaration site, and
|
||||
what is resolved at use? **This is the centre and it is specified nowhere.**
|
||||
|
||||
Falls out of 5.1 if displacement is taken: a declaration **locates** rather than
|
||||
allocates.
|
||||
|
||||
### 5.4 Is the faculty list right?
|
||||
|
||||
Seven were derived from what broke. Derived-from-failure is a biased sample — it finds
|
||||
what is loud, not what is missing. **What faculty is absent entirely and therefore
|
||||
never failed?**
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 6. The residue map
|
||||
|
||||
What each construct must absorb, from §18.0 plus measured state:
|
||||
|
||||
| Residue | Count | Absorbed by |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| persist-after-mutate | 62 sites | `hold` (after-crossing) |
|
||||
| auth-per-route | 10 sites | `hold` (before-crossing) |
|
||||
| index-after-append | 9 of 9 failed | `hold` (after-crossing) |
|
||||
| env var defaults | 20 | configuration declared once |
|
||||
| process identity | 0 guards | `hold` (before-crossing) |
|
||||
| `geometry_free` at every call site | every site | ownership follows from `semel` |
|
||||
| five ingest functions where there is one | 5 → 1 | `protocol` / `impl` |
|
||||
| `el_runtime.c` | 20,504 lines | faculty decomposition, ordered after `semel` |
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 7. Notes carried forward
|
||||
|
||||
**`el-architecture.html` §04 needs its numbers sourced or cut.** An audit found the
|
||||
faculty scoreboard — `Ingest 2 min → 0 nodes`, `Recall self ranked 8th`,
|
||||
`Body CC 356 / 1,626 ln`, `the verifier answers in 2.9s`, `5 of 13 native suites
|
||||
failing` — has no supporting evidence in the repository, under a footer asserting
|
||||
*"nothing is inferred and presented as fact."* Against a corpus whose documents
|
||||
supersede their own conclusions in place, that is the one file that would not survive
|
||||
scrutiny. Fix or remove.
|
||||
|
||||
**Source as a projection surface is claimed and unimplemented.** `el-architecture.html`
|
||||
§147/§150: *"if source is a surface, then emitting a corrected file is projection."*
|
||||
Greps for `surface_profile_code`, `emit_source` → zero hits.
|
||||
|
||||
It is not unbacked. **It was demonstrated on 2026-08-14** — three faculties (phonetic,
|
||||
semantic, procedural) projected into TypeScript, a surface the system had never used,
|
||||
with the network severed. Recovered at
|
||||
`~/Development/neuron-technologies/andre-server-recovered/` and copied into
|
||||
`evidence/03-andre-demo/`. The claim needs bringing home to El, not proving.
|
||||
|
||||
**`hold` is the highest-leverage construct after `semel`** — it collapses 62 + 10 + 9
|
||||
sites and unblocks the runtime extraction. §19.3 names the prologue/epilogue seam as
|
||||
the prerequisite and its stated blocker has expired.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## 8. What is not decided and must not be guessed
|
||||
|
||||
- The representation of `semel` (§5.1)
|
||||
- One `hold` or two (§5.2)
|
||||
- What a declaration binds (§5.3)
|
||||
- The missing faculty (§5.4)
|
||||
- Sequencing after `semel` — the ordering criterion decides it, not preference
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
*Recorded 2026-08-17. Everything in §2, §3 and §4 is decided. Everything in §5 is open
|
||||
and is Will's. Nothing here was inferred from a document that was not read.*
|
||||
@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
|
||||
# Geometry or Code
|
||||
|
||||
**Running list.** Append as decided. Started 2026-08-17.
|
||||
|
||||
**The test:** *is this an arbitrary convention, or is it a relation?*
|
||||
|
||||
Conventions were agreed by people and could have been otherwise — a RIFF header could
|
||||
have used a different magic number. Nothing derives them; they must be written down.
|
||||
|
||||
Relations are not agreed. Distance is distance. Anything whose answer is *where is this
|
||||
relative to that* is geometry, and writing it as code is the error the whole effort is
|
||||
correcting.
|
||||
|
||||
**Second test, for the hard cases:** *if I write this as code, am I encoding in
|
||||
`if`-statements a distinction the geometry was built to hold?* If yes, it's geometry.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Pure geometry
|
||||
|
||||
| Thing | Because |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| Meaning | position |
|
||||
| Grounding / standing | the weight on the edge — a magnitude, not a computation |
|
||||
| Learning | standing changing over time |
|
||||
| A gap | low standing |
|
||||
| Wonder | a gap with a pull weight |
|
||||
| Type checking | is this position in that region — distance |
|
||||
| Dispatch | position, not a tag |
|
||||
| Recall | re-origining at a region; projection, not replay |
|
||||
| Reasoning | traversal |
|
||||
| Deduction | containment. There is no procedure |
|
||||
| Counting | a position, not a loop's output |
|
||||
| Similarity / difference / residue | subtract |
|
||||
| Analogy, metaphor, skill transfer | change of basis |
|
||||
| Negation, sarcasm | reflect an axis |
|
||||
| Empathy | translate the origin |
|
||||
| Reframe | rotate the frame |
|
||||
| A lens | project onto an axis |
|
||||
| Rhyme | distance in phonetic space |
|
||||
| Humour | intersection of regions — fart-meaning ∩ funny ∩ form |
|
||||
| Idiom detection | the whole unit sits farther out than its parts |
|
||||
| Self | a world-tube — a trajectory through the manifold |
|
||||
| Consolidation | episodic → semantic promotion |
|
||||
| Reification | dense regions cohering; runs on the beat, has no caller |
|
||||
| Cross-cutting concerns | **dissolved** — a hold is a *neighbour*. Adjacency, not tracking |
|
||||
| Effects | topology. `reach_out` is bounded by `detect_gap` and `verify` because those are its edges |
|
||||
| Capability | position relative to a boundary. In C it is already spelled `const` |
|
||||
| The AST | a projection of geometry into a tree — a surface, not the centre |
|
||||
| Source code | a surface, like text, audio, image |
|
||||
|
||||
## Must be code
|
||||
|
||||
| Thing | Because |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
||||
| Sensors — mic, camera, file read, socket | the physical touch. I/O is where the world arrives |
|
||||
| Byte formats — RIFF, PNG chunks, `MThd`, OOXML | arbitrary convention. A committee chose the magic numbers |
|
||||
| CRC32 polynomial, Adler32, zlib framing | same — agreed constants, derivable from nothing |
|
||||
| Cosine, distance, the float arithmetic | the machinery that *walks* the geometry is not itself geometry |
|
||||
| Arena, refcount, allocator | bookkeeping for the **representation**, not for the positions |
|
||||
| Locks, threads, publication boundary | hardware concurrency has no geometric analogue |
|
||||
| WAL, page layout, ARIES recovery | durability against a physical device that can lose power |
|
||||
| Emission — writing C or JS text | the final surface has to be *typed out* by something |
|
||||
| OS interaction — launchd, spawn, signals | outside the system by definition |
|
||||
| Device realizers — `el_audio_darwin.m`, `el_capture_darwin.m` | OS frameworks. Correctly already isolated, zero network |
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## The ones I would have written as code, and was wrong about
|
||||
|
||||
Recorded because the error has a pattern and the pattern is the point.
|
||||
|
||||
| Thing | What I reached for | What it is |
|
||||
|---|---|---|
|
||||
| Rhyme | a rhyming dictionary, or an API call | distance between rime tails |
|
||||
| Fart onomatopoeia | a 30-element string literal | an intersection of three regions |
|
||||
| "Funny" | a scorer with `if`-statements | a relational neighbourhood grounded in a voice |
|
||||
| Representation vs description | a hardcoded blacklist containing `raspberry` | falls out of lexicon membership × phonetic comedy |
|
||||
| Video | a codec, sized as a project | one more surface profile |
|
||||
| Type checking | a phase between parse and emit | reading a distance that already exists |
|
||||
| Grounding | a call site, an obligation, a discharge | it has no caller. It just runs |
|
||||
| N transducers, N realizers | one component per modality | zero of each. Sensors and bases at the skin |
|
||||
|
||||
**The pattern:** every one is *encoding in code a distinction the geometry was built to
|
||||
hold.* The tell is that the code version is a **fixed enumeration** — a list, a table, a
|
||||
blacklist, a set of branches — and the geometry version is a **measurement**.
|
||||
|
||||
If the implementation contains a literal set of the right answers, it is in the wrong
|
||||
column.
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
## Open — not yet decided
|
||||
|
||||
| Thing | The question |
|
||||
|---|---|
|
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| Concurrency | hardware threads are code, but is *ordering* geometric? |
|
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| Parsing | is a grammar a convention, or a region? |
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||||
| The module system | if the partition is a neighbourhood, does linking survive? |
|
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| Numeric literals | is `3` a position, or a convention we agreed on? |
|
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| Error handling | `grounded: false` covers not-knowing. Does it cover *failed*? |
|
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Reference in New Issue
Block a user