Impedance Matching LIFT The Universe With Baseline

[hostilefork]

@hostilefork

Natives rely on the idea that their arguments in the FRAME! are not abstracted, so they don't worry about SETTERS or GETTERS etc.

They use a macro called ARG() to get at their arguments, and (currently) expect that argument to be in non-DUAL format.

This does suggest that non-DUAL arguments should be stored in an "as-is" state, with the twist that it doesn't set CELL_FLAG_SLOT_HINT_DUAL.

It occurs to me that we're paying for an entire flag, for something that is simply a base state.

...So why isn't the dual state a LIFT_BYTE() of 0?

If all DUAL states were required to be plain and not antiform, it would bump everything up by one:

DUAL_0
ANTIFORM_1
NOQUOTE_2
QUASIFORM_3
ONEQUOTE_NONQUASI_4
ONEQUOTE_QUASI_5
...

The limitation of only having plain states for duals has one positive implication, which is that they can theoretically be represented in PACKs, and you could arguably use PACK to assign them. Because PACK nominally represents everything inside it as either quasiform or quoted, the only thing left you can put in blocks and not conflict are plain things...

I spoke about SPACE as being the unset state, for instance:

[a b c]: anti [~null~ _ '10]

Though that's a bit opaque. Since we can pick anything that's not an antiform, quasiform, or quoted... a WORD! could be good...but a special-looking one, like *unset* could draw attention:

[a b c]: anti [~null~ *unset* '10]

The limitation of saying that the dual states can't be antiforms seems like it has more benefits than drawbacks.

This is more uniform, and more economical. It should be able to put "Slot" (as in Object's VarList Slot) beneath "Value" in the same contravariance pattern so if you know a Slot is safe you can just cast it and use the memory directly.

Pretty wild!