@page runs web/examples/check.sh and web/examples/quotes.sh against the compiler
dune just built. @cells runs spike/x86/cells.sh, which was a real pass/fail check
-- four builds, two backends, 22 22 against 42 42 -- that nothing in the tree ran.
@checks is @page, @x86 and @cells together, and its comment argues for where the
boundary sits: everything you can run while making coffee is in, @sanitize and
@valgrind are out because folding tens of minutes in would make the umbrella the
thing nobody has time for, which is the disease rather than the cure.
All three scripts learned to resolve FLAN to an absolute path, which is what
actually stood between them and a dune rule: %{workspace_root} expands relative to
the directory the rule is written in, and every one of these scripts cd's somewhere
before using it. The first run of @page failed with twenty diffs all saying
'../bin/main.exe: No such file or directory', which is at least a failure that says
what is wrong.
docs/BUILT.md carried the same colon-spelled renderer block index.html did, from the
same sweep. Nothing checks BUILT.md, so it is corrected here by hand.
The renderer check greps a line out of NEXT.md, and NEXT.md is a scratch document
that gets rewritten. The line went, the grep went empty, and the empty-needle guard
did its job and said so -- into a report nobody was reading. Behind that noise the
page was genuinely wrong: the colon-to-dot sweep rewrote every field label in the
corpus and lib/render.ml writes .field today, so the inspector block on the page had
been showing {:x 1.5 :y 0} for a renderer that prints {.x 1.5 .y 0}. test_repl.ml's
fixtures are the authority and they are dots throughout, with an enum member still a
colon; the page now matches. The anchor moves to test/programs/raylib-imported.flan,
which dune test builds and runs, so it cannot quietly stop saying it.
The LLVM excerpt beside it moved too: a --dev main pushes a condition frame before
anything else now, which shifted the SSA numbering by one. The three quoted lines are
what flan emit --dev prints today, with the frame push marked as elided rather than
silently dropped.
quotes.sh had been red since the compiler's diagnostics grew a source excerpt: the
needle swallowed the caret lines, so result, quoted and i64index failed against a
page that is in fact correct. It now compares the message and nothing else.
Six other probes are deleted rather than fixed. Vec, Map, Handle, an Fn-typed
parameter, a defer inside a let and break were all refused as not-implemented when
the loop was written; all six work today and the page's table lost their rows as
each landed, so the probes were the last thing in the tree asserting a claim the
page no longer makes. What made this invisible for weeks is worth recording: flan
check answers a program that compiles with its whole symbol table, so each of those
probes failed by printing eighty lines of prelude signatures. A clean exit is now
its own one-line failure saying the page's claim has gone stale.
web/examples/check.sh was failing, and had been since 2026-09-12. printing.out
records the structural printer's output with colon field labels; the printer emits
dots. The language is right and the recording is stale -- the colon-to-dot sweep
worked on Flan source forms and never touched a .out file, and check.sh is not
part of dune test, so nothing has run it since the day both landed. The acceptance
suite settles which side is correct: it expects the dot spelling everywhere and is
green. The page quoted the same stale line.
The x86 paragraph told a reader that conditions are the visible gap and quoted a
build failing by name. That exact command now succeeds and produces a binary:
conditions, guards, cells, redefinition modules and DWARF all landed, the survey
is 103 MATCH / 0 DIFFER / 0 refused, and what is still refused is narrow enough to
name -- an aggregate crossing the C boundary, which is the classifier this backend
exists not to have.
ArithError was absent from the page entirely. It sits beside the bounds section
because it is the same decision twice, including the part where no restart is
established at the failing operation. Its two programs are in web/examples/ and
checked, which is the page's own rule for anything it quotes.
swap!, reverse!, sort!, sort-by!, index-of, min-of, max-of, map!,
reduce and filter, each written once over $t. Every call site in the
corpus moves with them.
min-of and max-of are not min and max because min and max are builtins
over two or more numbers and nothing shadows a builtin. These reduce a
slice, which is a different operation at a different arity.
sort-bytes! did not collapse into sort!, and the reason is the point of
the predicates: a [u8] is not ordered? and cannot be, because < is an
instruction and comparing two slices lexicographically is a loop. It is
sort-by! with bytes<? written in, one line, keeping its name and its
stability note. sum-i32/sum-f32 and append-i64!/append-f64! stay for the
reasons the spike gave.
Not what the notes predicted: none of the ten collapses on a signature
change alone. filter and reduce need copyable? because the checker
demands it - reduce's accumulator at (Vec i32) is a double move - and
the rest declare it because a slice of owning elements would have them
duplicating headers.
The slot after a defn's parameters is unconditionally a type. Parse.decl no
longer takes a set of type names, and is_type_form, qualified_type, types_in,
declared_types and prelude_types are gone with the pre-pass that fed them.
What they were for: (Option f64) and (Some 1) are the same s-expression, so the
parser decided which it had by looking the head up in a set of the file's own
type names. Sound -- one top-level namespace means a name cannot be both a type
and a value -- and brittle, because the set had to be complete. It was wrong
twice in one day, the second time parsing (defn f [] (Rune {.code 65}) (bar))
as a function returning a Rune with a one-form body, silently, in every file in
the language.
Two things fall out. A type the parser could not have known -- a struct
declared further down the file, rl/Vector2 behind an unresolved alias, a
prelude type -- never needed recognising, only placing. And a mistyped type is
a mistyped type: (defn f [] f65 0.0) reaches the resolver's near-miss check and
says did you mean f64, where it used to be read as the first form of the body
and reported as an unknown name.
Unit is written (). The old spelling is refused with a message naming the new
one, the rule the colon-to-dot change followed. Internally it is still
Tname "Unit" and Types.Unit, so the resolver, the shim and the emitter did not
change; Cimport still builds Tname "Unit" for C's void without going through
the parser. Types.to_string prints () though -- that printer prints what a
person would write for every other type it knows, [i32], {K V}, (Ptr T), and
Unit was the odd one out once the source spelling moved.
Dropping prelude_types removes one of the two reasons Macro.reduce may only
drop defns: the memoised set a bootstrap build could have poisoned is gone, so
the remaining reason is the plain one.
The mechanical half, ahead of the parser change that needs it. tools/unit-return.py
fills the empty slot with () and rewrites Unit as () wherever a type is spelled --
(Fn [i32] Unit), (Map i32 Unit), a return type written out.
Deciding whether a defn already had a return type is the whole difficulty, and
the script does it the way parse.ml did: is_type_form is transcribed rather than
improved, because being identical to the parser it replaces is what makes the
sweep meaning-preserving. It is re-runnable, so the lanes that branched before
this can have the same pass at merge:
python3 tools/unit-return.py .
python3 tools/unit-return.py --in-strings test/test_flan.ml test/test_acceptance.ml \
test/test_session.ml emacs/test-flan-dev.el emacs/test-flan-mode.el
python3 tools/unit-return.py --raw-ml lib/prelude.ml
python3 tools/unit-return.py --in-html web/index.html
-v logs every defn it saw and what it decided, which is how a sweep of 440 sites
gets reviewed at all. Embedded modes pool a file's type declarations across all
its fragments, because a snippet split across concatenation -- decls ^ "(defn f
[s [u8]] Cursor ...)" -- cannot see the names the other half declared; pooled
names count only in bare-symbol position, for the same reason the prelude's do.
A fragment that cuts off mid-form is skipped rather than guessed at. Five sites
in test_flan.ml still needed a hand, and they are in this commit.
Two things ride along because the sweep needs them: parse.ml reads a lone () as
the return type of a function with no body, which was not a shape the old
optional slot could produce; and the map refusals name () rather than Unit, since
that is now the spelling a caller wrote.
The script is in tools/ rather than thrown away, because two lanes are
writing Flan in the old spelling right now and their files need the same
pass at merge.
It works on forms, not on text: a keyword becomes a dot only where it sits
in a field-label position inside a brace, so an enum member in value
position, a map key inside an EDN string and a type-position {K V} are all
left alone. :keys keeps its colon -- it names no field.
The .out file and the two places that quote it in prose had the banner
from before restarts were numbered, so check.sh had been red on
breakdemo since that commit. The .out is regenerated from the same
build --dev and timeout run check.sh does, rather than typed: the leading
blank line and the three spaces before each number are part of what is
compared.
The page gets a sentence it was missing. A number in front of a restart
is not decoration -- a restart is taken by position, because an inner one
can shadow an outer one of the same name -- and the banner showed the
numbers without the page ever saying what they were for.
print and println had no line anywhere on index.html — a builtin the reader
meets in the first example and is never told about. There is a section for
them now, between arrays and the prelude: what the walk covers, that an enum
comes back as its name and a Ptr does not get followed, that a string is raw
at the top and quoted inside a structure, and that the depth and span caps
are what keep a grid from printing a screenful. printing.flan is beside the
other examples so check.sh has been green on every line of it.
The prelude's table loses its output row, because the prelude has no output
functions left, and the fifty-odd example blocks follow the files they quote.
Two pinned things moved. sand-headless prints 15595743031174623232 where it
printed -2851001042534928384: same bits, read unsigned, because the cast that
made it signed is gone. bounds.flan's trap moved from column 28 to 19, which
is where (at xs i) now starts on that line.
And the indirection-cell illustration is defer.flan rather than hello.flan.
hello.flan cannot show a cell any more: its one call was to a prelude
function, and println is compiler-provided, so the smallest program makes no
Flan-to-Flan call at all. defer.flan's main calls work, and is already on the
page a few sections up.
The quote checker found three of them on the first run against the new tip: the
sand hash was changed deliberately by the grid lane, break and continue now
refuse by name instead of reading as unknown functions, and the usage text grew
--debug. The prelude also grew a string and UTF-8 family the table did not list.
`case $x in *""*)` is always true, so every check whose text came from a grep
went green the moment the line it greps for was renamed — which is exactly the
case those checks exist for, and they guard files other lanes are editing.
Verified by pointing one grep at a string that is not there: ok before, FAIL
after. sqrt-f32 was overstated in the same spirit; it is a declare, not Flan.
It is the project's headline cross-target claim and the page was asserting it
second-hand. Both targets print 2256461126764447066 on this machine, so the
transcript is now what the page shows.
The paraphrase of why a wide index is refused was shorter and said less than
the message; and the keybinding table came from NEXT.md, which is two keys
behind flan-mode.el, so it now reads the keymap instead.
The blocks that are not programs were the ones that had drifted: the usage text
had lost its indentation and the refusal table had trimmed "(see plan.org)" off
every message, so the page was showing wording the compiler does not print.
NEXT.md prints the banner with the restarts in source order; the walk is
innermost-first, so it is the other way round. A --dev build under timeout is
enough to settle that, and settles the two place and global snippets with it.
Copying a snippet into HTML is where a documented language stops being the
real one. Each block on the page is a program here with its recorded output
beside it, and check.sh is what says the page is still true after a change.
