The author's exception to the foreign-spelling list: int is i32 and float
is f32, and nothing else on that list moves.
Spelled in Types.ikind_of_name and Types.fkind_of_name rather than as two
prelude defaliases, because Check.is_cast asks those two functions and never
the alias table — a prelude alias would have left (int x) with no reading
while (i32 x) had one. Both names join primitive_names for the same reason
one layer down: that list is what decides (vec-new int) and the three-element
(defvar x int).
Nothing reverses: ikind_name still says i32, so every message, signature,
inspector line and DWARF name shows the machine type whichever spelling was
written.
A defalias restating the builtin is the no-op it says it is; one pointing the
name anywhere else is refused, since the alias table is never consulted and
the declaration would otherwise mean i32 in silence.
Isolated test_dev is 4-in-6 here against 2-in-6 at the base, which is noise.
The full suite is 5-in-5 here against 0-in-5 at the base, which is not — and
with this lane's three acceptance rows disabled it drops to 1-in-3. The rows
add compile jobs to the pool test_dev runs alongside, and a busier machine
loses the trap_park poll race more often.
Still not a new defect, and none of this lane's compiler code is implicated.
But the earlier note's suggested fix is now worth doing rather than noting,
and saying 'noise' would have sent the next reader the wrong way.
1. The bare (dead-beef) built its default with Int64.of_int32, which
sign-extends 0xDEADBEEF to -559038737 on a node tagged u32 — where the
spelled-out literal arrives as 3735928559, because in_range admits it as
the unsigned value it is. Masked to 32 bits, so the two spellings really
do carry one payload; verified by diffing the emitted bodies of (dead-beef)
and (dead-beef 0xDEADBEEF), which are now identical instruction for
instruction.
2. The refusal's catch-all told a union and a function value that they
'carry a tag that names a case'. Neither does: env.unions is the untagged
unions, and an Fn is a code address. Split into one arm per reason —
union, Fn, enum, Option, data type — and each is now pinned, so they
cannot quietly re-merge. Same correction in FIX.org's bullet.
3. js.ml prefixed its own message with 'js: ', which bin/main.ml prepends
too, giving 'js: js: ...'. Dropped, and the message now names the builtin
it refuses, which its comment already claimed it did.
4. FIX.org said x86.ml reads both pattern helpers out of Emit. It reads only
word_of_pattern; the tail walks rax with shr.
It exits 1 with no FAIL line, which is the shape an earlier lane wrote up.
Two-of-two early failures looked like they might be this lane's, so: 4 in 6
here against 2 in 6 on a detached worktree at this branch's own base commit,
running test_dev alone. Noise at that sample size, same exception, same
mechanism.
Adds one detail to the earlier note, which had only ever seen the flake on
dev-trap-null-alloc: one of my six landed on dev-trap-free-all instead, so
what is racy is trap_park and every row that calls it.
F1 was the blocker and it was the worst kind of fault this pass can have: the
condition message told the reader to write (not= x 0), and not= does not
exist — the operator is !=. Applying the compiler's own advice got 'unknown
function not= — did you mean not?'. Both branches say != now, and all three
— the named form, the float zero, and the unnamed one — were checked by
compiling the sentence the compiler prints.
F5: a typo of a declared capitalised name got the generics lecture. (Piont 1
2) with Point declared was told that a capitalised name given type arguments
is milestone 5 work, which is a confident answer about a feature nobody was
reaching for. The did-you-mean runs first and, for a capitalised head only,
asks the type tables as well; the generics sentence is left for a head that
resembles nothing.
F2: flan_dyn_cast_kind had the site live and passed NULL on the trapping
path — the one entry point on this side that had a location and threw it
away. The acceptance row now pins the prefix it prints.
F3: the case-typo row used (data ...), which is not a top-level form, so it
refused as an unknown top-level form and the needle 'unknown' matched that
rather than the rule. Rewritten with defdata, and as a pair: a capitalised
head gets no accessor advice, a lowercase one does. Both halves were checked
to fail when perturbed.
F4: an end-to-end pin for the headline. programs/dyn-trap-site.flan is
compiled, run, and its stderr read for the file:line:col in front of the
sentence, on both backends and at -O0. Proven live: three failures when the
expected line is wrong.
F8: usize and size_t stay off the foreign-spelling list, and the comment now
says why — the honest answer is pointer-width, which is u64 here and u32 on
wasm32, and a tree that builds both cannot name one of them.
F10 pins the fourth dot shape. F6 moves the not-reached reasons out of the
commit bodies and into FIX.org, where they can be read without git.
DISCUSS.org's "need a value-producing array constructor": the author
wanted grid filled with 255 as part of its declaration and could not
write it. (array n T) produces the zeroed array only, and dotimes is
Unit, so it can mutate a place that already exists but cannot be the
initialiser expression -- which has to produce the whole value in one
go. The grid was declared zeroed and filled in main instead.
Two forms, both expressions, both any rank:
(array-fill [rows cols] 255) every element that value
(array-gen [rows cols] cell) every element (cell i j)
Spelled apart rather than one form dispatching on the third element's
type, because an array *of* function values is a thing to want and one
form would have to decide whether (array-fill [4] f) meant four copies
of f or four calls of it.
The dimensions are read in Parse, and that is the whole reason they are
recognised there: handed through as an ordinary call, [rows cols] is an
array literal of two names, and where those names are defconsts it is a
perfectly good two-element array of integers -- the wrong reading, and a
silent one. Read in Parse they are the same len the [n T] type spelling
takes, resolved by the same array_len, with one extra condition of their
own: the fill counts in i32 like every index in the language, so a
dimension no i32 can reach has no loop that could end.
The lowering is a loop over a slot, not an aggregate. Tast.Arr is the
node the backends have and both build it element by element from a list
as long as the array; a fill of [600 [800 u8]] is half a million
elements and there is no list to be had. So these bind the array to a
slot, zero it, run one While per dimension writing through Set of a
Pindex, and answer with the slot -- While, Set and Pindex, which is the
argument check_loop already makes for recur. Nothing new reaches a
backend and all three get the form with no edit. The value stays
value-like: the slot is the form's own, and the Local at the end copies
out the way any array-typed expression does.
Row-major is pinned, not incidental: the first dimension is the
outermost loop, and a generator that counts observes it. The fill value
and the generator value are each bound once before any loop starts, so
(array-fill [n] (next-id)) is one call and n copies of its answer.
What falls out for the defvar the note was written about, and neither
half is a carve-out:
(defvar grid [rows [cols u8]] (array-fill [rows cols] 255))
is the spelling that works -- a typed global with a computed
initialiser, which is the startup-lifted path with the init-once guard
that defvar already had, so the fill runs once and the value survives a
re-run like any other computed one. The three-element spelling means
what the 2026-09-20 rule says it means: not a type, so a dyn global, and
a typed fixed array crosses into dyn only as a view of storage that
outlives the view. A freshly built array is a temporary, so it is
refused -- by the element rule where the elements are themselves an
array, by the lifetime rule where they are one of the three scalars a
view carries. Both refusals are the ones any other temporary gets.
The type an array-fill builds never goes through resolve, so resolve's
own guard is asked again where it is built: a fixed array of function
values would be zeroed, and a zeroed function value is a null pointer.
The author's revision. The name says what it writes, and the pattern is the
program's to choose: (dead-beef) is DEADBEEF, (dead-beef 0xBAADF00D) is
BA AD F0 0D. One byte-order rule covers both — a pattern's ascending bytes
are its big-endian bytes, which is how the hex literal reads left to right —
so every candidate DISCUSS.org listed is now spellable without the compiler
naming any of them.
The bare form is not a case a backend knows about: the checker writes
Tast.dead_beef_default in where the argument would have been, so
(dead-beef) and (dead-beef 0xDEADBEEF) are the same node and an acceptance
row prints both to say so.
The operand is an ordinary u32 expression, which is what the byte arm
already accepts for its byte. A literal is byte-reversed at compile time and
still reaches the loop as an immediate; a computed one is reversed at run
time, by llvm.bswap.i32 on one backend and bswap on the other, after which
the tail shifts its bytes out of the word rather than folding them. The
program runs a computed pattern over lengths 6 and 7 deliberately: that is
the case a constant-only implementation would pass by accident.
filled is untouched, and so is the fill boundary.
[flan_merged_park] drained the agent's ring on one of the two flags that
wake it. [program_poll] — which an expression sets, by way of [Program.wake]
— polled and went back to sleep; [program_asked] broke out of the loop and
re-entered [flan_program_main] with the queue untouched. A plain
redefinition sets neither, so a body delivered to a parked program was still
in the ring when the run it was delivered for started, and installed at that
run's first frame boundary instead: everything main did before its first
(agent/poll) ran the body the person had already replaced, and the change
showed up one run late. A redefined main is the whole of a run, so it would
have had to be asked for twice.
Both flags drain now, and the exit drains before it leaves. The re-run is
still tested first and cannot be starved: the flag is latched at the top of
the round and nothing in the round can clear it.
The transcript row in test_dev.ml asserted the old ordering by name — two
lines out of the second run, the first of them the stale body — so it is a
line shorter now, and the absence of that line is the claim. The park-note
fixture grew a print of the redefinable body before its first poll, which is
what makes the new row able to see which body the re-run started with.
This is what the note the delivery is answered with has been promising: a
module queued against a park installs no later than the program's next run.
It now installs before that run's first frame rather than during it.
flan--declaration-heads was topped up a name at a time, so it had lost
defdata and all four of the object and dispatch heads. A head missing
from it is not a quiet fallback: the form goes to the expression
evaluator, and the daemon answers "defclass is a top-level declaration,
not an expression" at the line you pressed the key on. Confirmed both
ways against a real daemon on test/programs/dev-class.flan -- the old
list gets that refusal, the new one installs, and defgeneric and
defmethod install through the same path (area@point, area).
Re-derived whole from Parse.decl, which is the honest authority. The
comment said the authority was the declaration arm of Parse.expr, and
that was never quite true: declare and declare-c have been in this list
from the start and Parse.expr has no arm for either. So the rule is the
plain one -- is it a declaration -- and package is a single named
exception, kept because the two keys have always differed there and
nothing about a line written once at the top of a file asks for that to
change. The rationale in test-flan.el's package check said the same
stale thing and says the surviving reason now.
The new check reads the list off Parse.decl and asserts both keys on
every head, so the derivation is the test rather than a claim beside it.
Two accepting and twelve refusing. Also records that the three acceptance
rows were confirmed to run rather than inferred from a green exit: the
expectation was broken on purpose once and all three reported.
(defmacro do-grid [[r rows c cols] & body] ...) — positional names, a [ ]
pattern wherever an argument is a vector, and & for the tail. The reading of
the list lives in Expand, below both sides that need it: Parse turns it into
the bindings a macro body opens with, and Macro checks a call against the same
reading before expanding it, so arity and shape are refused with the call's own
location rather than with the Loc.from_macro stamp every node of an expansion
carries.
The breaking half: [args] used to bind the whole argument list and now binds
the first argument. The whole list is [& args], and every defmacro in the tree
— prelude, vendor, tests, the elisp fixtures — was migrated to it. One grammar,
not a legacy mode.
DISCUSS.org's sentinel-fill idea, built as two builtins because the author
asked for both: a memset with a byte the program picks, and the fixed
DE AD BE EF pattern a hex dump reads as DEADBEEF.
Both are spelled the way (zeroed) is — the value of whatever type is
expected of them — so (set grid (filled 0xFF)) fills a place and there is
no second, place-taking form beside set.
What may be filled is numbers, and structs and fixed arrays built out of
them. Everything else is refused by name: a filled dyn is a collector root
pointing at nothing, a filled Vec header frees a wild address, a filled
slice length is a bounds check that passes, and a filled bool is an i1 to
LLVM and a whole byte to x86, which is the one divergence this feature
cannot have.
The byte fill is llvm.memset / rep stosb. The four-byte pattern cannot be
a memset on either side — the intrinsic takes one repeated i8 — so it is a
counted dword loop in emit.ml and rep stosd in x86.ml, with the pattern
bytes and their little-endian word living once, in Emit. A size that is
not a multiple of four ends on DE, DE AD, or DE AD BE.
(set p.x 1) was being told that a field is read with an accessor, which is a
sentence that does not apply to the form it is printed under. The place
spelling is (set (.x p) 1), checked to be a real form.
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.
A bare {.field v} had its refusal in Parse.expr, before any checking, so a
defn whose return type was the only place the struct's name appeared could
not build one. The refusal moves to Check: Parse builds an Ast.Bare out of
the same struct_fields the named form uses, and check_bare reads the type
name off the expectation and hands that very list to check_struct. ZII, the
unknown-field refusal and the duplicate-field refusal are therefore not
copies of the named form's rules but the named form's rules.
Braces at a dyn want are the dyn map literal and stay exactly that. A
.field-keyed brace was never part of that spelling, and at a dyn want it is
refused by name rather than given a second meaning.
(Cell 1 2) is the other half, and it is character-for-character an ordinary
call, so only the symbol table separates them. It is decided on the last arm
of named_call, after a local of function type, a generic and the function
table -- so a defclass constructor, which is a real defn, resolves above it
and is untouched. Arity is exact: ZII is what the braces do, and a positional
list cannot say which field it left out, so it is not allowed to leave one
out. The refusal names the first field it did not reach and points at the
spelling that does mean "zero the rest".
Both are gone before any backend sees them -- Tast.Make either way -- and the
three acceptance rows print the same lines to say so.
[merged_serve] waited up to ten seconds for the program to bind agent.sock
before it started [accept_loop]. The listening socket was already up, so an
editor connected fine and then heard nothing: every first request of every
session cost the whole wait when the program calls (agent/start ...) late —
sand.flan starts it after rl/init-window returns — or never.
Nothing the editor asks needs that socket. In one process a delivery is a
call into flan_agent.c, not a connect, and the two-process daemon has already
waited for the bind in [two_process] and fails if it never comes. What the
wait was for is the sentence a program with no agent deserves, and a sentence
does not have to be in front of the loop to be said. So it is a deadline the
session passes ([agent_check]) rather than a wait it does: read from the
accept loop between connections and from [serve] before each request, because
an editor holds one connection for a whole session and the loop is not
cycling while it is attached. No thread, for the reason lib/dune gives about
what the merged link does to this library's dependencies.
Delivery stays honest either way. A program that links no agent at all
refuses through [over_socket]'s ENOENT, as before. One that has the agent but
has not started it takes the module into the ring and is answered with a note
that promises the poll and not a frame: a program with no (agent/poll) in it
never installs this, and "at its next frame boundary" would be the reply that
makes a redefinition look applied when it is not. C-x C-e's five-second
timeout gets the same distinction instead of asking whether a program that
has not got to its loop yet is calling the poll in it.
And the note a parked program's delivery carries is now said once per park.
A finished program is parked, so re-evaluating while a run's output is on the
screen repeated a paragraph on every C-c C-c. The first delivery of each park
explains itself; the rest say the one line that is the claim. [rerun] clears
the flag as well as [eval] does, so a new park is a new reader.
Ranks 7, 10 and 19.
A defn whose name is a builtin's is silently unreachable — the dispatch
reaches every builtin arm before it looks in the function table — and the
arity refusal that followed measured the call against the builtin while
pointing at a call the reader had written for their own. The count stays the
builtin's, because the builtin is what runs; the message says so and notes
the definition that is not being reached. The shadowing itself is not
refused: that is a language decision and not a fix pass's to make.
FIX.org recorded and's misdirected caret with three rejected fixes and one
accepted — check_if preferring the arm that is not a compiler temp — and said
it was a check.ml change nobody owned. and's last operand is its then arm and
the sentinel carrying the previous operand's location is its else arm, so the
mismatch landed one operand early. Only and needs it: in an or the chain is
already in the else arm, and with an expectation in hand neither arm is
checked against the other.
'expanding this declaration produced 2 of them' had no antecedent once read
cold. The head of the expanded form is the macro's name and says what
expanded, and the expression form names (do ...).
Ranks 13, 14 and 9.
A body form in the return slot was blamed at whatever leaf the type parser
gave up on — the [1] in [(defn f [x i32] (+ x 1))], three forms deep — where
the mistake is that the whole form is in the slot. The slot is blamed now and
the parser's own reason keeps its span as a note. Where the parser gave up on
the slot form itself the old shape stands, because a message like 'unit is
written (), not Unit' already names the right thing and leading with it is
better than restating it. The literal -- is an em dash now, like everything
else in the tree.
A one-field case binds the payload itself, so [(match s (Circle c) (.r c))]
reached for a field of an f64 and got a type fact. The binding carries what
the pattern made it, in words, derived at the arm from the case and the
subject; the refusal says the value is already in hand. Set by that path and
nowhere else, so every other binding's refusal says exactly what it said.
The missing collection asserted a thing and contradicted it in the same
sentence — 'is a directory named nosuch somewhere above X, and there is
none'. It states the rule and the two ends of the search instead. The bare
/. it printed was Filename.concat of a directory and a dot, and is cleaned
where the path is made absolute.
Ranks 15, 6, 11 and 18, all of them the same fault in different words — the
message states a fact the reader already had and leaves out the half only the
compiler can see.
'k is a constant' was four words. It says what a constant is, names defvar,
and notes the defconst — [no_container_defconst] is the house's shape for
this and [declared_note]'s is the note's.
(let [x i32 5] ...) is what everyone arriving from a typed language writes,
and let has no annotation slot, so the i32 became x's value and the 5 was
left over: 'binding 5 has no value', which reads as if they had miscounted.
The annotation is blamed now, at its own span. Checked only when the vector
was about to be refused anyway, and the test for 'this names a type' is
syntactic because nothing resolves at parse time.
The unterminated string had one column on the opening quote and no note,
alone among this reader's three two-place errors. It has the same note its
neighbours have.
'+ takes numbers, found string' pointed at the whole form when the operand
was right there — the same whole-form-vs-operand fault the condition work
fixed once already. Text gets the extra clause it was reaching for, naming
concat and join without a call shape: the spelling that builds a slice of
byte slices out of string literals is not a clause in a sentence, and a
message that guessed at one would be wrong.
The four the defvar review left behind, plus the two the author's dogfooding
notes name.
A three-element defvar that is neither a type nor a value gets a paragraph
about the fork it stands at, and the paragraph is right for the name that
genuinely could have been either. Three names cannot: a data case, which is
a third thing with its own spelling; a name another language uses for a type
this one has; and a plain type typo, where a confident one-edit suggestion
was turning a line into four. Each answers first now.
A bracket form never reaches that fork at all — the parser gives it the type
reading outright — so a value name inside one landed in [resolve_name] and
came back as a lecture about generic code. Both readings at the element that
decided it, and the dyn spelling it offers is checked to be a real form.
[int] is two edits from [i32] and so outside the one-edit net, correctly:
two edits is a guess. But the name is not a guess, it is what four other
languages call the default integer, so a short list answers it by name.
Nothing goes on that list without one honest answer — [char] and [void] are
off it, and the comment says why.
A parameter called [i] is not a mistyped [i8]. The machine types size
themselves in the name, so a typo keeps the digits and a parameter name has
none; that is the rule that stopped (defn idx [v i] dyn ...) being refused.
A type written in a two-element defconst was reported as an unknown name,
because that form has no type slot and the brackets read as an array
literal. A type name inside one is unambiguous — a type and a value cannot
share a name here — so it says what happened and names defvar.
Two register warts alongside: no message cites a repo filename at the reader
any more (plan.org in three, spec-memory.md in one).
Two of the audit's top five, and both are the same complaint: the message
states a type fact and stops where the reader needed the other half.
A call argument's refusal now says which argument of which function it is and
notes the parameter's own declaration, which is [declared_note]'s shape moved
to the place the audit calls the most-hit message in the compiler. [fns]
threw the parameter names and locations away when it resolved the types, so
[fparams] keeps the vector as written; a foreign declare and a generic copy
have no entry and degrade to the message alone rather than a wrong pointer.
The enrichment is conditional on the refusal being raised against the
argument's own span, so a mismatch deeper inside it is not misattributed, and
the rekind stops a nested call being named twice.
A condition that is neither bool nor dyn now states the rule instead of the
fact, with the comparison spelled out using the condition's own name where it
has one. Two things it does not do: it does not offer a comparison for a type
that has no zero, and it does not say anything about the dyn side, where
Clojure's truthiness means 0 is true. The re-check at bool still runs first
and its answer is kept wherever it knows more — a literal names itself, and
[None] names itself, and both beat a type name.
Two of the audit's four cheapest structural wins, and they share a raise
point. [p.x] is how C, Go and Odin spell field access, and it arrived here as
the symbol [p.x] and left as 'unknown name p.x' — true, and no use to anyone.
The head is looked up now, so the refusal can say what [p] actually is, and
the struct's declaration comes along as a note. A capitalised head is left
alone: [Shape.Circle] is a real spelling and a typo in one is a mistyped case.
[near_miss] was written, tested and wired to the type tables alone, so a
mistyped value name got the bare refusal. [one_edit] is hoisted out of it so
the value side matches on the same rule rather than a second one that would
drift, and the candidate list at a value position is the scope, the globals
and the functions — plus, at a call, the builtin names, which live in no
table the checker keeps and reach the raise through a forward reference.
Two repairs alongside: the data-type message's format string carried eleven
stray spaces from a wrapped line, and (Pair i32) in a defvar had lost the
type fork's 'generics are milestone 5' answer when it started falling down
the value fork.
The dyn arithmetic and ordering entry points printed their sentence with no
file, no line and no column, which in a dynamic-first language is the type
error arriving from nowhere. flan_rt.c's bounds and arithmetic traps have
taken an emitter-threaded (loc, loclen) pair since they were written, and
[flan_dyn_cast_kind] is the fresh precedent on the dyn side; this is the same
pair, threaded through [arith], [want_nums] and [order] to the five
arithmetic and four ordering entry points. [eq] never traps and takes none.
The three trap printers take the pair and print nothing for a NULL loc, so
every other call site in the file — and test/dyn_ops.c, which calls the
runtime directly and has no source position — keeps its sentence byte for
byte. [trap_oom] is left alone: it is reached from [gc_alloc], which has no
site to be given and would have had to grow one on every allocation path in
the file for no reader's benefit.