A struct is a data strucure, of course of course

Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:09:52 +0000

When I started designing this language, I had a lot of fundamental decisions to make. Among those, one of the easiest was whether or not to allow virtual functions in scrml structs.

If I had chosen to include virtual functions; I would have just called these data strctures objects.

If you were paying attention, you might see why.

A struct is a data structure. Plain and simple. But, you see, it is within that simplicity, the power is made plain.

Lets define a unit of data as a value over over a type ( x/T ). Some would claim that it is state over type. Philistines!

State is data that is presently being witnessed.

While this might seem like a trivial distinction. The real differentiation comes from the realization that state is not witnessed in piecemeal. it is accepted as a whole, or thrown out as invalid state.

State is, therefore, immutable by nature.

So then, what of structs? I'll cover that in the next article "State. Why its not data."

Just kidding. I hope this next part is becoming more obvious.

So are struct mutable? ... Depends. But, let the default be: the node-tree structure should be immutable. Hence, a user definable structure. the values should mostly bi mutable, with each node mutation re-validated against it's type (or predicate if run-time validation is reqd)

Simple. And because it's simple, we can analyze it, exhaustively.

Enter enums, engine, and other super-powers that "objects" just can't match .)

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A struct is a data strucure, of course of course