A function that can suspend execution and, when called again later, resume where it left off, in the middle of the function body. See the coroutines note for more details.
A type that depends on another value. For example, a variable n‘s type might be “the length of s”, for some other slice-typed variable s. Dependent types are a way to implement bounds checking, but they’re not the only way. Wuffs does not use them.
An extension of the type system, such as purity (freedom from side effects), applied to functions. See the effects note for more details.
Syntactically, effects are the exclamation and question marks, ! and ?, at function definitions and function calls. These denote impure and coroutine functions.
A boolean expression (e.g. x > y) that happens to be true at a given point in a program. See the facts note for more details.
A unit of time. One flick (frame-tick) is 1 / 705_600_000 of a second.
Arithmetic on numerical ranges. See the interval arithmetic note for more details.
Arithmetic that wraps around at a certain modulus, such as 256 for the base.u8 type. For example, if x is a base.u8 with value 200, then (x + 70) has value 270 and would overflow, but (x ~mod+ 70) has value 14.
A ranking of arithmetic operators so that an expression like a + b * c is unambiguous (for the computer), equivalent to exactly one of (a + b) * c or, more conventionally, a + (b * c). While good for brevity, Wuffs does not have operator precedence: the bare a + b * c is an invalid Wuffs expression and the parentheses must be explicit. The ambiguity (for the human) can be a source of bugs in other security-concious file format parsers.
Some binary operators (+, *, &, |, ^, and, or) are also associative: (a + b) + c and a + (b + c) are equivalent, and can be written in Wuffs as a + b + c.
A basic type further constrained to a subset of its natural range. For example, if x has type base.u8[0 ..= 99] then it is an unsigned 8-bit integer whose value must be less than 100. Without the refinement, x could be as high as 255.
base.u8[0 ..= 99] and base.u32[0 ..= 99] are two different types. They can have different run-time representations.
Non-nullable pointer types can be thought of as a refinement of regular pointer types, where the refined range excludes the nullptr value.
Arithmetic that stops at certain bounds, such as 0 and 255 for the base.u8 type. For example, if x is a base.u8 with value 200, then (x + 70) has value 270 and would overflow, but (x ~sat+ 70) has value 255.
The set of facts at a given point in a program.
An empty struct (with no fields) used as a placeholder. Every written-in-Wuffs function is a method: the receiver is mandatory. A Wuffs utility type‘s methods are to its package what C++ or Java’s static methods are to its class.
“Utility type” is merely a Wuffs naming convention. For example, Wuffs' base package has a type called base.utility, similar to how the zlib package has a type called zlib.decoder. Unlike “dependent type” or “refinement type”, “utility type” is not a phrase used in programming language type theory.