The Luce reference

This is the normative description of Luce: what the compiler in this repository accepts and what it means. It is terse on purpose.

What it is not. It is not an introduction — that is the tour. It is not a collection of worked programs — those are the examples. It is not a rationale; where a decision has reasons worth reading, the guides hold them and this document links out.

Where it disagrees with the compiler, the compiler is right. These pages are written against the tree, and every sample on them is compiled and run when the site is built, but the source and the tests in the repository are the last word.

Citing a rule#

The ownership page gives every one of the 43 ratified situations a fixed anchor — #s21, #s13 — that does not move when its wording does. The compiler quotes those numbers in its diagnostics, so a message that says [OWNERSHIP.md S21] points at exactly one clause here.

Source text and lexical elementsEncoding, indentation, comments, literals, keywords, operators. TypesValues, heap objects, optionals, and the type of every expression. ExpressionsOperators, precedence, calls, indexing, slicing, and the two refused shapes. Statements and declarationslet, var, assignment, control flow, func, struct, and file-scope constants. OwnershipThe ratified memory model, S1 to S43, each one addressable on its own. Traps and errorsEvery trap code, both error codes, and what each one means. ModulesImports, the std namespace, and the three rules that keep it honest. BuiltinsEvery free function and every method, with its signature.