Open Questions

Spec questions that were raised during v0.2 development. All were resolved through Socratic debates (full rationale in the Appendix).

Q1: Does the card keyword approach work, or cards defined inside templates?

No card keyword. Cards are regular templates with meta { kind: "card", fits: "MY_Format" }. Cards and templates are structurally identical — both have ports and meta. If we later need a card keyword, we can add it as syntactic sugar that desugars to a template (non-breaking). Removing a keyword would be breaking. See Compiler section → “Cards Are Templates.”

Q2: Should ring member accept just instance name or require port reference?

Both. The parser accepts implicit (member Console) and explicit (member Console.OptoCore_A) forms. The emitter must always output the explicit form — implicit breaks if someone later adds a second ring port to a device. See Compiler section → “Ring Networks (Detailed).”

Q3: Concerns about the slot block extension?

No concerns — the slot block extension (slot MY_Slot[1..3]: MY_Format { direction: "any", channels: 16 }) is supported. But the compatible list proposed in the original doc was inverted: cards declare fits: "MY_Format" in their meta instead of slots listing compatible cards. This avoids editing every template when a new card type ships. See Compiler section → “Inverted Slot Compatibility.”

Q4: Reserve card and ring keywords now?

Reserve ring and member — yes (concrete grammar design exists). Do NOT reserve card — we decided against the keyword, so reserving it would be misleading. card remains a valid identifier. See Appendix → “Reserved Keywords.”

Q5: Preference for deterministic ID scheme?

Double-colon separator: pl::CL5::Dante_In. The proposed pl_templateName_portName is ambiguous because identifiers contain underscores (pl_Dante_Patch_In — is that template Dante_Patch + port In, or template Dante + port Patch_In?). The :: separator cannot appear in PatchLang identifiers, making parsing unambiguous. Route IDs: rule::template::src::dst. Slot IDs: slot::template::slot. The loader should accept both pl_ (legacy) and pl:: (new) during migration. See Compiler section → “Deterministic Port IDs.”