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.
The !-means-mutates convention distinguished nothing — there is no
immutable counterpart to contrast with — so every mutating name drops
the mark: sort, sort-by, sort-bytes, swap, reverse, append, append-i64,
append-f64, encode-rune, split-next, map-remove, map-next, and the test
helpers beside them. Two could not simply shed it: map! is map-in-place,
because map is the into transform's word and means the non-mutating
thing; put! is put-at, because put is the Map builtin. The ?-means-asks
convention stays. Dated records keep the old spellings; watch.clj's
reset-spies! and the other Clojure names are not ours to rename.
A generic defn produces no Tast.fn, so the editor was told nothing had
been installed and nothing had gone wrong. eval now expands a redefined
generic name to its copies, and picks up any copy the running process
was never built with - which is how a redefined caller reaching a
generic at a new element type gets that copy built and loaded.
C-x C-e is the path that could really go stale, and did: it checks
against the live environment, so an expression naming a generic at an
unused type generated a copy that existed in no program and the thunk
called a symbol nothing defined. Marked and spliced.
There was no cache to invalidate. program_with_env builds a fresh env
every evaluation, so the instantiation cache cannot survive one; the
test pins that rather than inventing machinery for it.
A signature change reaches the session as a refusal about put!-i32, a
name the source does not contain. It now says which generic it is a
copy of, at which types, and that every copy changed together.
