chapter 01 · draft · edit the source

The first burial

One idea: a deposit is not a print.

Put this in a file called hello.nc.

// hello.nc — there is no main; there is a demand.

U0 greet()
{
  "Hello from the nether\n";   // deposited, not printed
}

demand greet();

Two things in it are not C.

There is no main. A Nether C file does not have an entry point, because there is no entry: nothing is entered. What it has is a demand, and a demand is the request that something be worked out. Nothing that is not demanded, directly or through something that is, is evaluated at all.

And the string on its own line is a statement whose value is not U0. Such a statement deposits its value into the trace. It is not written to your terminal. A program has no terminal.

Bury it.

$ nether bury hello.nc
buried   hello.nc → efed9b2a   depth 0   holes 0   4 nodes

Read that line across. hello.nc was evaluated and what came out was named efed9b2a. Its depth is 0, which means nothing in it touched the world. It has no holes, which means nothing in it is still waiting on an answer. It is four nodes in the ledger.

Nothing was printed, and nothing is going to be. Burial does not have a terminal either. To read what the program left, go and get it:

$ nether lamp efed9b2a
Hello from the nether

That is the whole of the idea. The greeting exists in the ledger because the program put it there. It reached your screen because you decided to look — a second act, by a person, after the fact.

Why this is worth the trouble

A program that can print can also print at three in the morning into a log nobody reads, or into a log everybody reads. It can print a password. It can print different things depending on whether it thinks it is being watched.

A Nether C program cannot do any of that, and not because it is discouraged from it. There is no prelude function that reaches a terminal. lamp is a tool an operator carries; it is not a capability a program holds. The separation is structural, and it is why §8.4 spends a paragraph on it.

What depth 0 bought you

$ nether strata efed9b2a
depth 0   pure

  nothing reached the world

  replayable: yes

strata answers one question: how far down did this go, and what took it there. This program went nowhere. Everything it says it did, it did with arithmetic and literals, and anybody can check that by burying the same file and comparing names.

That is the floor. Next is what a name is.