the cast
every language accretes a culture; kanso decided to choose its own before one chose it. these four live in the corners of the documentation. they are not mascots exactly—more like staff. they were all hired for taste.
ensō-neko円相猫
the first thing anyone notices is that she is almost a circle. the second thing is the gap. visitors assume she will close it when she finishes her nap. she will not. the gap is the point: an ensō drawn closed is a circle; drawn open, it is an admission that the work continues—and ensō-neko has strong opinions about people who pretend their work is finished.
she is the spirit of canonical form. she does not review your code, because there is nothing to review: either it is the one rendering, or it does not compile, and either way she stays asleep. it is said that every formatting diagnostic in the golden corpus corresponds to something that once woke her. there are twenty-two of them. she intends there to be no more.
mugi the tanuki麦
mugi runs the interpreter, which is to say: mugi is the interpreter. ask him anything and he answers in ten milliseconds, cold, no cache, no notes—tanuki have always been shapeshifters, and evaluating a program directly out of its syntax tree is just shapeshifting with extra steps. he keeps nothing between runs. he considers memory a form of debt.
he is paid in boba. the pearls, he insists, are values: opaque, immutable, pleasant to consume in sequence. when a program misbehaves he does not judge—he simply hands the err back up the chain, politely, to whoever declared an arm for it. his one vanity is that in all recorded history, he and tsuru have never disagreed about what a program means. he checks every night. it is called ci.
tsuru鶴
tsuru is the compiler. she folds your program the way her ancestors were folded—one crease at a time, each one irreversible, none of them optional—until dispatch is a branch, a pattern is an offset, a tail call is a jump, and the whole thing is small enough to fly. the binary is the bird. she does not consider this a metaphor.
she and mugi are bound by an honor code older than either of them: whatever he says a program means, her folded version must say byte for byte, or neither of them ships. she once matched a garbage-collected industrial language to a dead heat on its own benchmark and mentioned it to no one. it is on her page now because someone else wrote it down.
errエラー
err is the most misunderstood member of the cast, because everyone arrives from languages where his relatives are criminals—thrown, caught, swallowed, silently null. err does none of this. he is a value. he knocks at every function on the way up, is politely waved through by the ones that have no arm for him, and delivers his news to the first one that does. he never sneaks. he cannot be ignored—the endpoint rule makes pretending he isn't there a compile error.
he is small, he is vermillion, and he is having a better day than you assume. absence, he wants you to know, is his cousin none—they are often confused, but none is what you get when you asked; err is what you get when something broke. do not seat them together.