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5 changes: 2 additions & 3 deletions README.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -30,9 +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 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 and ColdStore.
See [`project.md`](project.md) for the full north star.

## A taste

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2 changes: 1 addition & 1 deletion docs/fmpl-tour.html
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Expand Up @@ -443,7 +443,7 @@ <h1>FMPL<span class="of">, &ldquo;of Accardi&rdquo;</span></h1>
<div class="sec-head"><span class="sec-num">§1</span><h2>Lineage and thesis</h2></div>
<div class="prose">
<p>The original FMPL (&ldquo;of Accardi&rdquo;) came out of UC Berkeley&rsquo;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 <em>live image</em> of prototype-based objects, edited from inside, serving many users at once, persisting across restarts. The program wasn&rsquo;t a file you ran; it was a world you inhabited.</p>
<p>This FMPL is <a href="https://github.com/nnunley">Norman Nunley&rsquo;s</a> — 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&rsquo;s CoolMUD (White also created MOO, the server LambdaMOO grew from).</p>
<p>This FMPL is <a href="https://github.com/nnunley">Norman Nunley&rsquo;s</a> — 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a href="fmpl-rehab-log.html">rehabilitated for public release by hand</a> — 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 <em>is</em> and, via 74 deliberately-ignored tests, where it is <em>going</em>.</p>
</div>
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