Reconsidered 14d's removal of Term::If. The decision was wrong.
"No redundancies" requires judgment; reducibility (if -> match)
is not redundancy in the strong sense. Term::If is a primitive
control-flow shape; bool branching is the second most common
shape after sequencing, and removing it cost 3x tokens on every
branch site (`(if c a b)` 4 tokens vs the match-on-Bool form
12 tokens).
Meta-pattern fixed: I had been treating user observations as
directives. User said "if is a subset of match"; I jumped to
remove it citing CLAUDE.md, with no independent conviction.
The leak appeared in 14f's JOURNAL prose ("three lines for what
if used to do in one"), which read as regret. Two feedback
memories saved (memory/feedback_user_suggestions_not_directives,
memory/feedback_no_nostalgia_for_removed_features) to head this
off.
Implementation: mechanical reverse-application of 14d's diff at
every site (AST, check including the 14e tail-position arm,
codegen 4 sites, surface parser/printer, pretty, CLI walker,
e2e test mutation). Removed lower_bool_match helper — it existed
only because 14d's migration shape needed codegen for non-ptr
match scrutinees; with Term::If back, match-on-Bool returns to
its pre-14d unsupported state. Three fixtures (sum, sort, max3)
restored to pre-14d shape. gc_stress (added in 14f) also
migrated back to (if ...) since it was authored under the wrong
constraint.
14e (musttail) and 14f (GC_malloc) verified intact in IR.
Hashes restored to pre-14d values:
- sum.sum: db33f57cb329935e
- sort.insert: 697fcb9f30f8633a
- max3.max: 65c45d6a45dd0a72
- max3.max3: 624b14429bf302f5
All other defs across all 18 fixtures keep their post-14f
hashes. Tests 80/80 green; cargo doc 0 warnings. LOC delta
+265/-295 net -30.
DESIGN.md Decision 7 preserved with a "Status: REVERTED" header
for audit trail. Form-(A) `if-term` production restored.
Plan: back to 15a (std_maybe stdlib module).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Decision 9 ships. Through Iter 14e every ADT box, lambda env, and
closure pair was leaked. This iter substitutes GC_malloc for malloc
in all four IR allocation sites and links -lgc. No language change,
no AST change, no schema change.
Diff: 5 files modified, ~30 LOC net.
- codegen/lib.rs: 4 substitutions @malloc -> @GC_malloc.
- ail/main.rs: .arg("-lgc") in the clang invocation.
- 5 IR snapshot files: mechanical s/@malloc/@GC_malloc/, 9
occurrences. IR is bit-identical to pre-14f modulo this
substitution — exactly Decision 9's promise.
- e2e.rs: new test gc_handles_recursive_list_construction.
- examples/gc_stress.{ailx,ail.json}: new fixture, builds a 50-
element list via recursive Cons, sums it (1275).
Hash invariance verified: every existing fixture def hash
unchanged (codegen and link line are downstream of canonical
bytes; AST didn't move).
Tests 79 -> 80, all green. Existing 79 byte-identical stdout.
gc_stress -> 1275. list_map_poly -> 2/3/4 unchanged. sort
sorted-list unchanged. cargo doc 0 warnings.
GC notes (pertinent to future work):
- GC_INIT() not needed on Arch libgc 1.5.6 (auto-init via
__attribute__((constructor))).
- No conservative-scan over-retention observed.
- -lgc alone sufficient for link (pthread/dl transitive).
Pattern-shape note from gc_stress fixture writing: the post-14d
"if-then-else" replacement is `(match (app == n 0) (case
(pat-lit true) ...) (case (pat-wild) ...))`. Three lines for
what `if` used to do in one, but uniform with the language.
Worth flagging for the stdlib brief.
Language is feature-complete enough for stdlib. The three
blockers identified at the 14b boundary (redundancy 14d, tail
calls 14e, GC 14f) are all done. Plan 15a: first stdlib module
std_list.ailx with length/append/reverse/map/filter/fold_left/
fold_right/head/tail/is_empty.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Brummel