Files
el/docs/v1/experiments/findings/answers.md
T
bigmerge c6ba0677f0 log v1 experiments: nineteen cycles, organised by the method that produced them
cycles/    one file per Ishikawa -> scientific method -> Six Sigma loop, named
           for the DEFECT not the fix, carrying the commit record as written at
           the time
findings/  what the cycles produced, cross-cut: live bugs, architecture answers,
           and defects in my own measurement

The organising finding is that predictions which came back FALSE produced every
significant result. Eleven of sixty-one failed, and those eleven found: that the
arity table was not drifted but 40% incomplete; that the AST traversal is
irreducible and only rules and judgments move; that guards could refuse through
the seam after all; and that routing el_bin_lookup through the gate did NOT fix
the SIGSEGV, because the fallback strlen was the hazard -- a wrong fix I would
otherwise have shipped as verified.

One cycle was run without committing predictions first and had to be discarded
as rigged. It is kept, in full, as 18-async-half-expressible.md.
2026-08-17 10:52:17 -05:00

2.1 KiB

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.