clojure-mode decided each shape. A with- head, and a def or with- head behind a namespace, indents as a body; a qualified head finds its unqualified spec. The rest was hand formatting: cond and match results under their tests, ordinary call arguments under the first one, and lone ; continuation comments rewritten as ;; lines above the code.
Review follow-ups on the mode pass.
The regression first, because it is the one that cost something: giving
macros a kind of their own took them out of three completion tables.
flan-disassemble, flan-disassemble-ir and flan-lowering each filtered
flan--defs on kind "fn", which had been the whole truth right up until
this branch made it half of one. A macro is compiled -- defmacro is a
defn by the time anything emits code -- so all three genuinely work on
one, and only the offer had gone. One flan--compiled-kinds names both
words and the three sites read it.
Then four sentences in the FIX.org entry that were not true, which
matters more than it sounds: that file is the history somebody reads
later to find out what happened.
The corpus claim was the bad one. It said the whole corpus round-trips
with zero differing lines. It does not, and never did -- the script that
measured it bound inhibit-message around its own reporting, which in
batch means the differences were found and then swallowed. Measured
properly: 317 files, 22 files and 389 lines differing before, 20 and 373
after. Sixteen lines fixed in two files, no new difference introduced,
and 373 lines still differing that this pass never looked at.
The other three: the fns/macros dedup is required by the new rows and is
not a fix to a bug that was there before -- a macro used to appear once,
as a fn. handler-case was already a keyword. loops.flan has three
labelled loops and dotimes-range.flan has the other two.
And three gaps the review found while checking: array-fill and array-gen
were never in the keyword list, Unit was in the type rule while the
parser refuses the word, and a prelude macro's row carried a bare name
where a program's carried its parameters. A check that pulls every head
out of parse.ml and diffs it against the three lists now comes back
empty, which is what the docstring had started claiming.
flan--special was three kinds of name in one list: the forms the parser
dispatches on, the functions the compiler provides, and the words that
stand for themselves. Drawing push like let said they were the same kind
of thing. They are three lists now, each read off the file that decides
it, and the two names in the old one that are not in the language at all
-- cast and none -- are gone with it.
What else had been missed: dyn, Allocator, Vec, Map, Fn, int and float
were not types, $t was not anything, handler-case was not a keyword, a
comma was not whitespace, & was not a name character -- which a macro's
parameter list needs, now that it destructures -- imenu had no heading
for a macro and none for the four dispatch forms, and a labelled loop
indented its body under its own binding vector, which loops.flan has
four of and would have said.
Then the second half. The defs op already told the editor what every
name is, and only completion and eldoc were listening, so a macro you
defined looked exactly like a function you defined. It carried no macro
kind to listen for and could not have: a macro is a defn by the time
there is a program. So the op answers with one -- keeping the location
off the defn it drops, so M-. still goes there -- and with the type
names, read off the checker's environment, since an enum is an i32 and
an alias is gone by then.
The editor draws them by kind, after the static rules and never over
them: a program defining its own length does not get to repaint the
builtin. A hash table and a matcher rather than a regexp of every name,
rebuilt when the cache is and not when a key is pressed. With no session
the rules come off and the buffer is what it always was.
The author: "I think I prefer length over len, because then I'll use len as
the variable name". One arm in check.ml, one row in the table beside it, and
every (len x) in lib, test, examples, vendor, spike, docs, web, emacs,
plan.org and NEXT.md rewritten.
Shadowing and builtin/ had already taken most of the sting out: a (defn len
...) was legal and won in its own file, and builtin/len reached past it. What
was left is that len was still a builtin — the defn earned a warning, and a
wrapper had to say builtin/ at every inner call. Now there is nothing under
the short name: len is an ordinary identifier in every position, which is
what (let [len (length xs)] ...) wants.
length takes over as shadowing's worked example rather than the feature
losing one. shadow-builtin.flan, builtin-qualified.flan, pkgs/shadowed and the
builtin/ rows in test_flan move to it and go on testing shadowing.
A call to a len nothing defines is answered where an unknown function is,
after every table and after the shadowing guard, so a program with its own len
never reaches it. The sentence is said rather than guessed at — len and length
are three edits apart and the did-you-mean's net is one — and the call is
written back out through spell_arg, as-slice's spelling lifted out of it and
now shared, so what is printed compiles.
sand.flan:33 still calls the old name and is the author's to change; until it
does, test_acceptance and test_session abort there. Both were run green
against a copy with that one line changed. FIX.org says so.
The trio the author decided on 2026-09-20 is now all built: def is CL's
defparameter — its initialiser runs on every daemon re-run, unguarded, so
an edited initialiser repaints the same storage on C-c C-c plus re-run —
defonce (Clojure's name for CL's defvar, per the author) initialises once
behind the .init~once. flag, and defconst stays the image.
One parse arm reads both forms; the difference is Ast.reinit, carried to
Tast.global's grerun. Emit.startup_plan gives a def no guard flag, and
Check.check_global lifts every def initialiser — zero and literal
included — into global/<n>, so the host's startup reaches it through the
function cell and a re-evaluated def swaps it (Session's def_inits;
Emit.redefinition declares the cell for a non-sibling target). The old
defvar spelling is refused with the rename and both compiling spellings,
and every program, test, doc and editor list is swept — except sand.flan,
the author's live WIP, whose seven defvar lines are flagged in FIX.org
and keep its three dependent tests red on this branch.
*flan-output* is gone. The program's output lands in the daemon's buffer
always — renamed *flan-dev* to *flan* — and at the REPL when one is open,
inserted above the prompt, output first and the value after it. A
rejection puts its message in *flan-diagnostics*, which now pops up, and
leaves one line at the prompt pointing there; the diagnostics buffer got
a major mode of its own, read-only with n/p/RET, and the memory sites
from flan-check-memory render into it as one section below the errors,
replaced whole on every ask. Two clears at the REPL, on CIDER's keys:
C-c C-o for the last send's output, C-c M-o for the transcript.
No daemon changes: output already rides every reply's :output, so both
destinations are editor-side routing.
Each was decided in DISCUSS.org; this is the elisp side of all six.
The eval value goes to the end of the line now, where flan-watch has
always put one, and it is echoed as well as drawn. Both of those
overturn a documented decision, so both docstrings and the MANUAL say
what the behaviour is rather than still arguing the old case: a value
wedged mid-line reflows the code after it, and a value that is gone at
the next keystroke with nothing left anywhere is worse than a number
said twice.
C-c C-i inspects what is at point with no prompt, and C-u opens the
minibuffer. It takes the form point is inside, not the one behind
point, because the middle of a name is where a key pressed without
looking lands.
Compiler messages are kept: *flan-diagnostics* accumulates one entry
per message, timestamped, never cleared by anything but
flan-clear-diagnostics. The overlay is unchanged. Each message line
keeps the compiler's own file:line:col: shape, which is both what makes
it jumpable and what makes it paste like a terminal line.
*flan-dev* gets compilation-minor-mode, so a main that does not compile
is a buffer you can M-g M-n through. Verified against a real diagnostic
rather than assumed: the default gnu entry matches the message line and
nothing else in the transcript, so there is no custom regexp here.
#_ is drawn as a comment, via a syntax-propertize-function that fences
the discarded span -- clojure-mode's approach, and the nesting rule is
the reader's, so #_#_ a b greys both with nothing counting.
And the two keyword lists are re-read off lib/parse.ml whole, rather
than topped up by name: defmacro, the four object/dispatch definers and
declare-c on one side; when, cond, and, or, break, continue, recur, fn,
quote, array, signal, error and the four condition forms on the other.
The unwinding handler, which spec-conditions.md named and left unwritten while
it asked whether the thing should be a macro over the two operators that were
already here. It should. (handler-case B [(T [c] A)]) is checked as
(restart-case (handler-bind [(T [c] (invoke-restart 'R c))] B) (R [c T] A))
with R a name the form makes up for itself, which is Common Lisp's own
definition of the operator and means neither backend needed a line.
What that buys is not economy, it is the correctness of the parts nobody can
see. The defers between the signal and the form run, and the allocator a
with-allocator rebound is put back, because a transfer already does both for
every frame it leaves. The body and every clause agree on one type, because a
restart-case's body and clauses already do, and a clause that disagrees is
refused with the same message an if with disagreeing arms gets. A condition no
clause lists installs no frame that matches it and goes on outward untouched.
A clause sees the establishing function's locals, which a handler-bind clause
cannot, because a restart clause runs where it was written.
The body comes first and the clauses after it, the opposite of handler-bind's
order: one reads as something put around a body and the other as a body with
answers hung off the end of it. The restart the two halves meet over is named
after the function and numbered within it, and it has to be unique per form,
because two nested handler-cases sharing a name would have the inner frame
shadow the outer one and land a condition at the wrong place.
The refusals name handler-case rather than the machinery underneath it, which
is why check_handler_bind and the restart clauses now take the word the reader
wrote. A break loop entered under a handler-case still lists the made-up
restart, and taking it there is refused loudly rather than answered wrongly;
hiding it would mean a field in a frame layout spelled out in three files.
The survey program runs the same under LLVM, at -O0 and under --x86: normal
completion, a caught condition, one nobody listed passing through with the body
carrying on, both defers on the way out, the two nestings against handler-bind,
a clause that signals and is caught outside the form it belongs to, and a
with-allocator whose restore is on the transfer path.
Emacs binds it in emacs-lisp-mode-map and nowhere else, so a mode derived
from lisp-mode inherits nothing and the key answers "undefined" — which
reads as the client being broken rather than as the key being free.
`-dev-` was in every Emacs symbol this client owns and meant nothing to anyone
typing one: the daemon is `flan dev` at a shell, but from inside Emacs there is
no other kind of connection to distinguish it from. `M-x flan-dev` is now
`M-x flan`, `flan-dev-quit` is `flan-quit`, the private prefix `flan-dev--` is
`flan--`, and every defcustom follows — ninety-odd symbols, with the two files
renamed to emacs/flan.el and emacs/test-flan.el so the file names say the same
thing as the symbols in them.
No aliases. Renaming a defcustom breaks a config that names it and there is no
way around that; the repo has no precedent for softening one, and an alias left
behind is what keeps a rename from finishing. MANUAL.md says the old names are
gone and how to fix a config, which is the whole of the migration path.
Three strings are not symbols and keep their spelling: `.flan-dev.sock`, which
bin/main.ml writes and which a renamed variable searching for a renamed file
would simply never find; and the two buffer names `*flan-dev*` and ` *flan-dev*`,
which name the `flan dev` subcommand's own output rather than anything in elisp.
`flan dev` with a space is the CLI and is untouched everywhere.
The entry point also stops asking a question it already has the answer to. From
a buffer visiting a .flan file it starts that file; from anywhere else it reads
one from the minibuffer as before; `C-u` reads one either way, which is how you
start a second program without leaving the first. The current buffer is still
the only source of the default — the bug where a previous project won over the
buffer you were in was fixed by removing `flan--file` from that position, and
nothing here puts it back.
Four checks on the `interactive' form, evaluated on its own rather than by
calling the command, because calling it would build and launch a program and
the question is only which file the form arrives at and whether it had to ask.
A fifth asserts that nothing answers to the old names. test/test_emacs.ml loads
the test file by path and test/test_session.ml names the client file in a
comment, so the rename reaches those two lines; nothing else outside emacs/ and
the docs moved. Verified by byte-compiling every file
clean and by `dune test` and `@page`.
The 30s deadline in the reply reader was a literal and its message said only
that nothing had arrived. It is flan-dev-reply-timeout now, and the message
names the daemon buffer to look in -- a first compile on a cold cache is the
case that legitimately runs long, and the build log is what says so -- and the
setting to raise. Still never resent: a request the daemon took and died on
may already have run.
Package headers on all eight client files, so package-install-file on the
directory works and the client is not reachable only by load-path. The
daemon-buffer defcustom moves up beside the other buffer names, because the
reply reader now names it and the byte-compiler reads a file in order.
The name freed up by the rename now means what C means by it: the members
overlay one storage, the size is the largest of them, the alignment the
strictest, and nothing anywhere records which one was written. It serves
two things that wanted it. Binding a C header means holding the union the
library holds and reading whichever member the library's own tag says is
live -- a tag Flan cannot see, because the rule relating them is prose in
a manual. Overlaying an f32 on a u32 to look at its bits is the other,
and it is the same read.
So that read is defined rather than refused. This is the one place in the
checker where bytes win over safety on purpose, and the alternative was
not a safer language, it was no feature: type punning *is* reading the
member that was not written. The promise is the one C's implementations
make and C's standard does not -- the layout is the target's, the bytes
are the bytes, a read is a reinterpretation of them -- and what is not
promised is anything about bytes nobody wrote, where a member wider than
the one last stored reads a tail that is indeterminate exactly as a
struct's padding is. ZII narrows that to almost nothing: a union starts
all-bytes-zero unless uninit says otherwise.
uninit on one is allowed, unlike on a defdata. The refusal there was
never about garbage; it is that a tag steers, and a tag no case names
falls past every comparison in a match into a block LLVM may treat as
unreachable. An untagged union steers nothing.
Which is also why three things are refused, each for a reason that does
not expire with a milestone. No move-only member: nothing knows which
member is live, so nothing can tear one down, and unlike the struct and
defdata refusals this is not waiting on recursive teardown -- there is no
fact for teardown to read. No bool at any depth: an i1 loaded from a byte
that is neither 0 nor 1 is a value the optimiser may assume cannot exist,
and a union is the only type that can produce one. No defdata at any
depth, for the reason uninit gives, arriving the other way round. An
Option member is fine and the walk says why: its match is a tag test and
a branch, not a chain with an unreachable tail.
Two members in one literal, a match on a union, a union map key and a
member written into a global initialiser are each refused by name.
A union is a field list whose every offset is zero, so it travels as a
Tast.structure and the checker, the emitter and the x86 backend each grow
one table rather than one shape. A value is a zeroed temporary and a
store -- Set over Pfield, which every backend already has -- so there is
no new IR node and no layout rule spelled out a second time per backend.
The LLVM type is the blob clang gives a union, the DWARF is
DW_TAG_union_type with every member at zero, and the printer names the
type and does not walk it: it cannot know which member is live, and one
of them may be a pointer.
cimport can now check what it could not. A C record holding a union
member was not recorded at all, so the defstruct beside it went unchecked
rather than checked wrongly; a named union member resolves to a defunion
now and the whole record is compared field by field. The defunion itself
is compared against the header's union as a set and not in order --
every member is at offset zero, so a permuted one is the same type and
reporting it would be a finding that is not one -- while a member the
header has and Flan lacks is reported, because that is what changes the
size. A defunion against a C struct, or a defstruct against a C union,
is reported in both directions. An anonymous union member is still
skipped, and the comment now says that the gap is on the Flan side:
there is nothing to declare.
Flan's tagged sum has been spelled defunion since it landed, which was
accurate right up until the language wanted C's untagged union as well.
Both cannot be called the same thing, and the tagged one is the one with
an alternative name that says what it is: a case, its fields, and a tag
that steers which case is live is a data type, not a union.
So the form is defdata everywhere -- the parser, the AST, the checker,
both backends, the prelude's Form, the editor's font-locking and imenu,
the docs and every .flan file in the tree. The internal vocabulary moves
with it: Tast.union is Tast.data, uname is dname, the tables the checker
and the emitter keep are datas. Leaving them would have inverted the
words permanently, with surface defunion meaning one thing and
env.unions meaning the other, which is exactly the kind of drift the
comments in those files exist to prevent. What did not move is case,
variant and vfields: a tagged sum still has cases, and it still has one
live at a time.
defunion is not kept as an alias. An alias would compile the day the
untagged form lands and mean the opposite of what it used to -- the same
silent misparse that made defn's return type mandatory, and worse,
because the reader would have no reason to look. The old spelling is a
named refusal instead, parse/defunion-renamed, which says what it is now
called and that the name is reserved for something else. It fires on the
head alone, so (defunion U [A B]) -- which would otherwise have parsed
cleanly as one field A of type B -- is refused with the rest.
basis had the same false promise the eval note did. It branches on the break
state, which answers "running" while the program is parked — the agent's
listener is alive and nothing has stopped — so disassemble reported that a body
delivered while parked installs at the next frame boundary, which is not a
boundary the program will reach until somebody runs it again.
And flan-rerun had no autoload. The keymap binds it, and flan-mode.el says in
as many words why every command there needs a real autoload rather than a
declare-function: a user who loaded only flan-mode would otherwise find the key
bound to nothing at the exact moment they most want it.
You run a program under flan dev, it opens a raylib window, you close the
window, main returns — and there is no way to get another window short of
flan-dev-restart-program, which throws away the build, the session and every
global with it. In Common Lisp or Clojure the image outlives main, so you call
it again. The process here already outlived main: the exit hook flushed, closed
stdout and sat in for (;;) pause(). Nothing could wake it.
So main() is a loop. The hook records the status and longjmps back into a
setjmp in main() — there is no return available, since flan_exit is reached
from wherever the program happened to be — and the thread waits on a condition
variable until the new rerun op signals it. The main thread is the one that
runs main again: a window belongs to the thread that opened it, and on macOS to
the first thread of the process. A longjmp pops no frame, so the park first
empties the handler stack, the restart stack and the shadow frame chain, each
of which was a chain of allocas in stack the next run is about to write over.
Nothing else is reset; the second run reads whatever the first left in the
globals, which is the semantics that was asked for.
Closing stdout had to go with it. That was how the compiler learned the program
was done, but a pipe delivers EOF once, so the signal and the program's output
were the same resource and spending it left the second run with nowhere to
print. The descriptor hazard the old code reopened /dev/null for goes away with
the close that caused it. Liveness is asked for instead, through a weak symbol
in the same style as the agent's, and is now three states rather than two: Live,
Parked and Gone. Every guard branches on that before consulting the break
state, because the agent's listener answers "running" while the program is
parked and telling somebody whose program has finished that it is running is
worse than saying nothing. Only eval accepts a parked program — it queues and
waits for nothing, and the queued module installs at the first frame boundary
of the next run, so a body can be fixed while parked and the re-run executes
it. Everything else needs a frame boundary or a stopped stack, has neither, and
says which, naming the command that gets the program back.
A re-run while the program is running is refused rather than queued: the test
and the signal happen under one mutex, so two mains writing the same globals at
once never starts.
:parked rides on every reply beside :stopped, for the reason :stopped does —
finishing is as unannounced as stopping, more so when the way it happens is a
mouse click on a title bar. Emacs shows flan:parked in the modeline and binds
flan-rerun to C-c C-M-x.
C-c C-m. One step on the bare key, the fixpoint under C-u: a macro may
quasiquote a call to another macro, and Loc.from_macro is outermost-wins, so
by the time a full expansion settles the intermediate name is gone. One step
is the only thing that can say which macro produced what.
The expansion runs against the macros the *session* holds -- the prelude's,
its imports', and every defmacro evaluated since it started -- and writes
nothing back: a defmacro handed to C-c C-m does not join the session by having
been looked at.
Both non-termination refusals stay refusals, and only where they are needed.
One step makes one call and does not look at the answer, so (s/spin) one-
stepped answers with itself; all the way hits the fuel and names the macro,
inside Dev.serve's guard, so the daemon replies rather than hanging. Macro's
module handling is a Fun.protect now -- a build that raised was a process
about to exit, and the daemon is not that process.
No printer for a Form existed. Form.to_string is an error-message renderer and
is what Macro.key digests, so it is untouched; Form.to_source round-trips
floats, strings and bytes through the reader, and Form.pretty decides where
the line breaks go and leaves the columns to flan-mode.
The answer is a read-only flan-mode buffer shaped like the disassembly one,
with cnr's idea in it: m expands the form at point one more step in place.
Three inherited keys refuse by name -- an expansion is in no file. The text is
sent padded onto its own line and its own column, unlike C-x C-e, so the
refusal lands on the call and not at the start of its line.
