The louder failure had the quieter answer. A generated reader accumulates
errors on the cursor — which is what lets it be a straight line of
assignments — and the cursor is made and dropped inside the entry point, so a
stray brace in a file read at run time handed the program a zeroed struct and
said nothing at all. That is the one thing the rest of vendor:edn refuses to
do: read-file answers an Option precisely so a malformed document is
distinguishable from one that is literally nil, and the hand-written reader in
test/programs/edn.flan tests ok? and prints the reason. ReadFailed is the
derived reader being as honest, in both packages, and it sits beside
SchemaDrift because both are "the file is not what this program was built for".
Then the writing-down. docs/BUILT.md gets the section: the four things the
macro system did not have and now does, each general and none of them
mentioning EDN — a macro reading a file at the call site's path, a package
macro calling its package, one call answering several declarations, and
compile-error, which is the one piece that had to go in the compiler and the
reason it had to. The set rule the real game file decided is there too, and
what defjson shares, which is the design and not the code.
NEXT.md item 9 and PORTING.md §3.9 both close. Not as (read-edn T bytes): the
struct comes from the *file* rather than from a type declared by hand, so the
~80 lines PORTING prices for two schemas are not written at all. The competing
answer PORTING names — compile-time embedding — turned out to be the other half
rather than a competitor: the shape comes from the file at compile time and the
bytes may come from an embed beside it, which is exactly what
test/programs/edn-provide.flan does.
The tokenizer refused #{} because "it needs a hash set to even
represent" — which is a claim about a reader, and a tokenizer represents
nothing. #{ now pushes } on the same balance stack { does, there is one
new token kind and no new closer, and err-set is gone rather than kept
with a message it no longer earns. skip-value needed nothing: it is
written against the depth and not against the kinds.
The dynamic reader moves out of test/programs/arena-edn.flan and into
vendor/edn/read.flan as (edn/read bytes), answering an (Option Value)
against whichever allocator the caller bound. Two decisions are written
down where they are made:
* a set is a Value.Set holding a deduplicated (Vec Value), because
(Map Value bool) does not typecheck — keyable refuses a key holding
a Vec or a Map — and restricting elements to keyable Values would
refuse #{[0 0] [1 0]}, which is the file this was built for. Insert
is O(n) against a structural value=?, so building the tileset's 54
pairs is 1458 comparisons, once.
* a Value copies every string into the allocator where a Token stays
a view. A view handed back out of the function that owns the buffer
is a dangling pointer, and free-all would not even take it. Odin's
json parser clones for the same reason.
An imported defdata was a refusal in load.ml — "not implemented yet
(milestone 4)" — and it had to go first. It is the type's name plus the
Type. half of a constructor symbol, which arrives as a Var node when the
case has no fields and a Struct node when it has; a match pattern needed
nothing, because a case resolves against the scrutinee's type and was
never a top-level name. programs/pkg-data.flan is that on its own.
programs/edn-read.flan reads assets/edn/tileset.edn, which is the
editor's real output: :texture-path and a :selected-cells of 54 integer
pairs, with no type declared for any of it. It also overwrites the
source buffer in place after reading and prints the document back, which
is the copy contract asserted rather than described.
