From 487bd3ab2f98c0c48e866951018ba40183c08c56 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Matt Parrett Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:55:27 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 1/2] docs: correct the MUD-lineage sentence to Nunley's own account MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The README and tour §1 said Nunley "co-wrote cool++, a C++ rewrite of Stephen White's CoolMUD." He corrected that on the fork's attribution PR: "I was one of the devs for cool++/coldmud. ColdStore is a better reference for what I was doing then." Two changes: "co-wrote" becomes "one of the developers on," and the reference points at ColdStore rather than the CoolMUD/MOO genealogy. The correction landed on the fork on 07-24 but never reached here — the branch carrying it is an advisory PR against a frozen base, so this is the first path to main. Research docs citing ColdMUD as an architectural influence are untouched; that part was never in question. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 --- README.md | 7 ++++--- docs/fmpl-tour.html | 2 +- 2 files changed, 5 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 1da9de7..60eff44 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -30,9 +30,10 @@ that grammar (see [`fmpl.ebnf`](fmpl.ebnf)) seeded this project. The syntax is only lightly similar to the 1992 language, and everything beyond the grammar — the streaming model, first-class PEG grammars, the indexed-RPN VM, capability security, the metacircular bootstrap — is new design. The MUD lineage is -first-hand: Nunley also co-wrote cool++, a C++ rewrite of Stephen White's -CoolMUD (White created MOO, from which LambdaMOO was forked). See -[`project.md`](project.md) for the full north star. +first-hand: Nunley was one of the developers on cool++/coldmud; ColdStore — a +C++ persistent object store and VM toolkit from that era — is the better +reference for what he was doing then. See [`project.md`](project.md) for the +full north star. ## A taste diff --git a/docs/fmpl-tour.html b/docs/fmpl-tour.html index c1ff127..1b1f236 100644 --- a/docs/fmpl-tour.html +++ b/docs/fmpl-tour.html @@ -443,7 +443,7 @@

FMPL, “of Accardi”

§1

Lineage and thesis

The original FMPL (“of Accardi”) came out of UC Berkeley’s Experimental Computing Facility around 1992 — a MUD server language in the LambdaMOO / ColdMUD tradition, with an interpreter written by Jon Blow. Those systems shared a distinctive shape: a live image of prototype-based objects, edited from inside, serving many users at once, persisting across restarts. The program wasn’t a file you ran; it was a world you inhabited.

-

This FMPL is Norman Nunley’s — a descendant of the original, not a restoration of it. The surviving link to the 1992 language is an EBNF grammar Nunley extracted from its sources back in the late 1990s; decades later, that grammar became the seed of this project. The syntax is only lightly similar to the original, and everything beyond the grammar — the streaming model, the PEG grammar system, the indexed-RPN VM, the metacircular bootstrap — is new design. The MUD lineage is first-hand, too: Nunley co-wrote cool++, a C++ rewrite of Stephen White’s CoolMUD (White also created MOO, the server LambdaMOO grew from).

+

This FMPL is Norman Nunley’s — a descendant of the original, not a restoration of it. The surviving link to the 1992 language is an EBNF grammar Nunley extracted from its sources back in the late 1990s; decades later, that grammar became the seed of this project. The syntax is only lightly similar to the original, and everything beyond the grammar — the streaming model, the PEG grammar system, the indexed-RPN VM, the metacircular bootstrap — is new design. The MUD lineage is first-hand, too: Nunley was one of the developers on cool++/coldmud; ColdStore — a C++ persistent object store and VM toolkit from that era — is the better reference for what he was doing then.

The project bets that the MUD shape is the right shape for AI agents. A modern agent system wants exactly what a MUD had: long-lived stateful objects, many concurrent actors (now LLMs as well as humans), capability-scoped access between them, and durable state that survives a crash mid-conversation. FMPL adds the modern half: streaming as a first-class concern, OMeta-style PEG grammars as the universal tool for parsing any stream — text, bytes, or structured values — and an async runtime for tool calls.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it shapes the codebase: most of this implementation was written by an autonomous LLM agent loop that Nunley set up and steered, iterating against a roadmap for months. It was recently rehabilitated for public release by hand — the agent harness sidelined to an archive branch (~30,000 lines), a build that works on a fresh clone, CI, and a documentation pass in which every claim in the tutorial was re-verified against a live REPL. The result is unusually honest about itself: the test suite encodes where the language is and, via 74 deliberately-ignored tests, where it is going.

From 28dbc438281a41ce318ac4e17529ac22e07820be Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Matt Parrett Date: Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:43:56 -0700 Subject: [PATCH 2/2] docs: take Nunley at his word on the lineage sentence MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit The first pass transposed his correction rather than rewriting it, and carried in wording that was his note to us, not prose for the README: "ColdStore ... is the better reference for what he was doing then." It also added a gloss he never offered ("a C++ persistent object store and VM toolkit from that era"). The sentence now states only what he said — one of the developers, on cool++/ColdMUD and ColdStore — and stops there. ColdMUD is capitalized to match the Lineage section two paragraphs up. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 --- README.md | 6 ++---- docs/fmpl-tour.html | 2 +- 2 files changed, 3 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) diff --git a/README.md b/README.md index 60eff44..b1abd23 100644 --- a/README.md +++ b/README.md @@ -30,10 +30,8 @@ that grammar (see [`fmpl.ebnf`](fmpl.ebnf)) seeded this project. The syntax is only lightly similar to the 1992 language, and everything beyond the grammar — the streaming model, first-class PEG grammars, the indexed-RPN VM, capability security, the metacircular bootstrap — is new design. The MUD lineage is -first-hand: Nunley was one of the developers on cool++/coldmud; ColdStore — a -C++ persistent object store and VM toolkit from that era — is the better -reference for what he was doing then. See [`project.md`](project.md) for the -full north star. +first-hand: Nunley was one of the developers on cool++/ColdMUD and ColdStore. +See [`project.md`](project.md) for the full north star. ## A taste diff --git a/docs/fmpl-tour.html b/docs/fmpl-tour.html index 1b1f236..e7c5688 100644 --- a/docs/fmpl-tour.html +++ b/docs/fmpl-tour.html @@ -443,7 +443,7 @@

FMPL, “of Accardi”

§1

Lineage and thesis

The original FMPL (“of Accardi”) came out of UC Berkeley’s Experimental Computing Facility around 1992 — a MUD server language in the LambdaMOO / ColdMUD tradition, with an interpreter written by Jon Blow. Those systems shared a distinctive shape: a live image of prototype-based objects, edited from inside, serving many users at once, persisting across restarts. The program wasn’t a file you ran; it was a world you inhabited.

-

This FMPL is Norman Nunley’s — a descendant of the original, not a restoration of it. The surviving link to the 1992 language is an EBNF grammar Nunley extracted from its sources back in the late 1990s; decades later, that grammar became the seed of this project. The syntax is only lightly similar to the original, and everything beyond the grammar — the streaming model, the PEG grammar system, the indexed-RPN VM, the metacircular bootstrap — is new design. The MUD lineage is first-hand, too: Nunley was one of the developers on cool++/coldmud; ColdStore — a C++ persistent object store and VM toolkit from that era — is the better reference for what he was doing then.

+

This FMPL is Norman Nunley’s — a descendant of the original, not a restoration of it. The surviving link to the 1992 language is an EBNF grammar Nunley extracted from its sources back in the late 1990s; decades later, that grammar became the seed of this project. The syntax is only lightly similar to the original, and everything beyond the grammar — the streaming model, the PEG grammar system, the indexed-RPN VM, the metacircular bootstrap — is new design. The MUD lineage is first-hand, too: Nunley was one of the developers on cool++/ColdMUD and ColdStore.

The project bets that the MUD shape is the right shape for AI agents. A modern agent system wants exactly what a MUD had: long-lived stateful objects, many concurrent actors (now LLMs as well as humans), capability-scoped access between them, and durable state that survives a crash mid-conversation. FMPL adds the modern half: streaming as a first-class concern, OMeta-style PEG grammars as the universal tool for parsing any stream — text, bytes, or structured values — and an async runtime for tool calls.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it shapes the codebase: most of this implementation was written by an autonomous LLM agent loop that Nunley set up and steered, iterating against a roadmap for months. It was recently rehabilitated for public release by hand — the agent harness sidelined to an archive branch (~30,000 lines), a build that works on a fresh clone, CI, and a documentation pass in which every claim in the tutorial was re-verified against a live REPL. The result is unusually honest about itself: the test suite encodes where the language is and, via 74 deliberately-ignored tests, where it is going.