core_spec Chapter 8 declares the text projection normative and leaves the form
unwritten; binary_format excludes it as "the Text Projection companion's". That
companion did not exist. spec/text_projection.tex v0.1.0 supplies it. No
implementation -- this is the gate.
It was blocked on P5. The projection's normative requirement is bidirectionality
WITH THE BINARY FORM, which needs bytes -> OperationEnvelope, and that decoder
did not exist until 3baf8d0.
Four ratified calls:
Reduced state is preserved by DETERMINING it, never by a second literal copy. It
is a deterministic function of the operation set and the canonical base; a text
carrying both would hold two sources of truth for one fact and nothing could stop
them disagreeing. core_spec's "all canonical reduced state" now carries that
reading inline rather than being silently reinterpreted.
A canonical base snapshot is INLINED as one opaque byte string. This is the call
with teeth. A base exists precisely so prior operations need not be retained, and
where they are pruned the base is derivable from nothing else -- so a
reference-only projection of a compacted document would be LOSSY, and the text
would not determine the document it claims to project. core_spec permits "encoded
compactly or referenced externally"; inline is the choice that keeps archival
honest, and core_spec now says why.
Lowercase hex everywhere: one rule, no alphabet or padding to canonicalize,
greppable. Base64 would buy a quarter of the bytes of the one body nobody reads,
at the price of a second encoding and a rule for which applies where.
One envelope per line: the stated use case is that merge conflicts surface at the
envelope level, and one line per envelope makes a three-way merge conflict
exactly an envelope conflict -- never a conflict inside one, yielding an operation
neither side wrote. It also removes all indentation, so canonicality has nothing
to hide in. Readability is a pretty-printer's job; what a pretty-printer must not
do is write its output back and call it a projection.
Strict parsing is stated in the terms P2-P5 taught: normalizing non-canonical
text IS accepting it. The rationale names both hazards this repo hit in binary --
a re-encode guard is blind to order-preserving sequences, and a guard on an outer
value can mask a lenient inner codec -- and prescribes the same total defence.
Conformance requires both directions: a projector alone cannot be checked.
One gap is stated in the document rather than left to be discovered: the atom
productions and line shapes are normative, while kind/action/policy/constraints/
barrier are derived from the Operation Catalog and the wire table rather than
spelled out. That is the difference between a design gate and a finished
companion.
Gate: clippy 0, 31 targets / 1031 passed / 0 failed, conformance 8/8, zero golden
churn; core_spec, binary_format and the new companion all build with no undefined
references.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Levi Neuwirth
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