vla-lang

The VLA language with nothing around it: forms, their expansion, the grid, the view record, and the machine that steps a grid.

Frazaro is a language for spreadsheet work: you write the steps of a procedure as English sentences, and Frazaro checks every sentence, refuses the ones it cannot read, in words, and carries out the rest. VLA is the Lisp beneath that English, the form every sentence translates into before anything is emitted or built. This crate is that language alone: the reader and the printer of its forms, the macro expander, the head table that names the core forms, the refusal catalogue's mechanism with the language's own refusals, the sheet model with its A1 coordinates and the references read out of a formula's text, the view record, one window of a sheet as the lines a viewport draws from, and recalculation's mechanism, the formulas of a grid computed in dependency order with a budget in cells. No English, no file format, no clock, and no dependency. Built for WebAssembly, the module's import section is empty.

frazaro-core stands on this crate and adds the bridges: the English engine with a proof per sentence, the VBA and formula emitters, the OOXML and OpenDocument writer and readers. frazaro is the command line over both. An engine that runs a grid as a game stands on this crate and never on the core, which is why the language is a crate of its own. The Excel add-in in the repository is the reference implementation; this crate is held to the same corpus of tests, so a form means the same thing here as there and is refused in the same words.

What it does

• Reads and prints VLA. reader::read_forms takes a text to its forms, each a symbol, a string, a number or a list with the line it came from; printer::write_datum and printer::write_pretty write a form back, as the add-in writes its goldens.
• Expands macros. expand::expand_text takes a program's text and a prelude's, defines the prelude's macros and expands every form to a fixpoint, refusing a malformed definition or a runaway expansion by name. The prelude is a library the caller passes: the repository's scripts/prelude.vla is the standard one, and a program may carry its own definitions. Twenty-seven primitives compute while a macro expands, over the data written in the source: the list operations (car, cdr, cons, quote-if, cond and their kin), arithmetic and comparison (+expand, -expand, *expand, quotient-expand, mod-expand, =expand and the rest), text joined or split into its characters (&expand, characters-expand), and a cell's address written from a row and a column or read back (address-expand, row-expand, column-expand, column-letters-expand). A name that ends in expand is computed while the macro expands; each refuses by name what it cannot compute.
• Names the core forms. headtable::row and headtable::resolve_head_alias answer for every form the language has, its aliases and its arity, from the table the add-in's own code exports.
• Holds the grid. sheet::Workbook, sheet::Sheet, sheet::Cell and sheet::Content: sheets of cells, each a text, a number, a truth value or a formula's text, with column widths, a style table and the row of the sentence that wrote each cell. Sheet::set_formula fills a range with one formula as Excel fills it, the references moved cell by cell.
• Reads references. refers::scan finds every reference inside a formula's text, cells, ranges, columns, rows, names, Tables, external books and 3D spans, and names the calls it cannot read; refers::r1c1 renders a formula relative to its cell, refers::shift_a1_references is the mover a fill uses, and refers::quote_sheet is the one sheet-quoting rule.
• Draws the view record. view::window_of finds a sheet and a window in a model, and view::view_text prints that window as lines: every sheet, the window and the sheet's extent, its columns and formats, then each cell's value or formula, its format and the row of the sentence that wrote it. It is the first implementation of projection::Projection, the seam a second projection enters by. view::view_text_valued prints the same record with each formula's computed value after it.
• Computes the grid. calc::Calc::new reads every formula off a Workbook, builds the dependency graph from the references and finds the order, naming every cycle; Calc::step evaluates the next cells of that order up to a budget in cells and says how far it got, so an engine can run a grid at a frame rate and yield; Calc::run evaluates everything. The parser reads Excel's operators and calls over the reference scanner, with Excel's precedence and coercions and its seven error values as a value kind. Functions enter through calc::Library, the seam: the language registers the fourteen a game's rule needs on day one (IF, AND, OR, NOT, SUM, MIN, MAX, ABS, INT, MOD, ROW, COLUMN, CHOOSE, SIN), and a crate above registers more, as frazaro-core registers Excel's library by measurement. A formula that calls anything else is not computed, and says so naming the function; a cell that reads it inherits the label. Calc::first_refusal is what an engine's load asks: a cycle, a function outside the library, or a construct the parser does not read, each refused by name from the catalogue.
• Runs a grid as a machine. machine::Machine is a grid kept between calls, for a game engine that steps it at a frame rate: Machine::load reads the rows a view or a reflect prints back into a grid, the record's inverse; write takes cell, formula and derived rows, all or none; step computes every formula in dependency order with a budget in cells, yields and resumes, and at the end of each frame copies every sheet's values into its twin, X.last, a hidden sheet the next frame's formulas read the previous frame from (=Screen.last!B2+1); view answers the record with each formula's value, or the plane, a byte a cell. Each formula is parsed once per shape (a filled formula, or cells whose R1C1 text is the same) and evaluated at each cell's offset. census prints the plan as rows before a frame runs: each shape's cells, the levels of the order it spans, the runs it is computed in and the path each of its reads takes, so that a grid's cost is read ahead (calc::Shapes::census prints a plan a door made of a workbook the same way). machine::Handles keeps grids under handles from 1, never reused, sixteen at once. The C surface over the four calls, vla_load, vla_write, vla_step, vla_view and their companions, is compiled always and exported only under the c-abi feature, so that no module built on this crate exports a second door to its grid.
• Refuses in words. Every refusal is a messages::Refusal, a value carrying the catalogue's id, number, source and text, never a panic.

Using it from Rust

cargo add vla-lang

use vla_lang::{expand, printer, reader};

fn main() {
    let prelude = std::fs::read_to_string("prelude.vla").unwrap();
    let program = "(when (> 1 0) (debug-print \"hello\"))\n";

    // The program with its macros expanded, and how many applications it took.
    match expand::expand_text(program, &prelude, true) {
        Ok((expanded, fired)) => println!("{expanded}; {fired} applications"),
        Err(r) => eprintln!("{} ({})", r, r.id),
    }

    // The same text read as forms and printed again, one datum a line.
    for form in reader::read_forms(program).unwrap() {
        println!("{}", printer::write_datum(&form));
    }
}

The contract

Bytes in, bytes out, nothing else. The crate has no dependencies, and nothing in it reads a file, a clock, a socket or a random number at run time. The two tables it needs, the head table and its half of the message catalogue, are embedded at build time from data/, inside the crate, exported from the add-in's own code and held to it by the repository's checks. vla_lang::VERSION is the crate's version, which is the release's, the add-in's and frazaro-core's, one number for the language.

Every text the crate reads is answered or refused by name, never with a panic, a stack overflow or a hang, so an engine can hand it a cartridge from anyone. The limits are public constants, each refused by its own id:

• lists nested deeper than 64, in what the reader reads and in what the expander writes (reader::FORM_DEPTH_LIMIT);
• a formula nested deeper than Excel's 64 levels, or longer than its 8,192 characters (calc::formula::NESTING_LIMIT, LENGTH_LIMIT);
• more than a million forms in what one macro application writes (expand::EXPANSION_SIZE_LIMIT), since the crate copies a macro's arguments into its template.

Real programs nest 10 deep at most and real formulas 6. Each stage is tested at its limit on a 1 MiB stack, the tightest an engine is given.

cargo build --release -p vla-lang --features c-abi --target wasm32-unknown-unknown

builds the crate as a WebAssembly module with the machine's C surface, whose import section the repository's tools/check_core_imports.ps1 holds at zero entries, so that no engine built on it can reach a socket, a clock or a file through the language, and whose exports tools/check_wasm_exports.ps1 holds to exactly its nine functions and its memory.

What comes next

Each is an item of the repository's roadmap (docs/BETA_ROADMAP.md), and this page gains its section when the item closes:

• Recalculation's next slices. Dates, the text functions, the lookups, dynamic arrays and spills, implicit intersection and @ (KERNEL.8); the vectorized evaluation of a shared formula, incremental recomputation and content-addressed evaluation (KERNEL.20), which is what makes a frame of a 320 by 200 grid fast: today the machine steps one in about a tenth of a second natively. The first slice is here.
• The corpus's expansion golden. The corpus program expanded under the prelude, written by the reference and reproduced here, beside the golden of the expand-time primitives the crate is already held to.
• An expander that shares what it walks. A macro that walks a list copies the rest of the list at each step today, so its cost grows with the square of the list: a table generator's walk of 2,000 rows takes about nine seconds natively (VLA.2).

Where it comes from

The add-in in the repository's src/ is the reference implementation of the language, and the goldens it wrote under scripts/ are what this crate is held to, by the treaty in conformance/README.md: the corpus program read, expanded and compiled byte for byte through the core, and the reference goldens the add-in writes reproduced by this crate's own tests. The crate follows the goldens and never leads them. It was cut out of frazaro-core on 2026-10-08 (PORT.12) so that an engine can stand on the language without the bridges.

The goldens and fixtures the tests read travel with the package, under testdata/, so cargo test runs from the published crate. The repository holds the copies to their sources byte for byte. The expander is held to the add-in's expansion of 135 cases, every expand-time primitive and its refusals among them (tests/expand_golden.rs). Beside the goldens, the tests hold the language's laws over generated programs (tests/laws.rs) and knock at every door with mutated text (tests/strangers.rs, and a longer run with --ignored).

Licence

Apache-2.0. The repository's REUSE.toml maps every file to its licence.