Reference¶

Commands at a glance¶

Command	What it does
`hql eval <program>`	check and evaluate an argument
`hql check <file>`	print the type without evaluating
`hql run <file>`	check and evaluate a file
`hql repl`	read, evaluate and print, keeping bindings
`hql render <file>`	run the HQL cells in a document and build the Markdown document they yield
`hql help <name>`	the declarations of a function, type, trait or module, with their doc strings
`hql builtins`	list the steps
`hql config`	the reporting mode and shown level in force, and where each came from
`hql doctor`	check the semantic-search chain and name the first missing part
`hql ai`	list the model requests waiting under `--ai host`, and answer one (next release)

hql '<program>' is hql eval '<program>'. - reads standard input wherever a file is taken. Success is exit 0, a language or I/O failure 1, a usage error 2.

Doc strings¶

A block of /// lines opened after an empty line is the doc string of the declarations below it, up to the next empty line. hql help <name> and :help <name> in hql repl print each declaration of a name with its module and doc string; :type <name> prints the first sentence. The pages below are the standard library's doc strings, one page per function, type and trait.

The standard library¶

std/core — The types every other module is written in: the scalars, the collection types, the open tree Data, absence, failure, value order, the format category and the core traits.
std/doc — Documents: a header of everything known about one and a body someone wrote, and the card, a document a vault holds.
std/retrieval — Retrieval: a corpus ranked against a query.
std/graph — Graphs: nodes and the edges among them, structural only; what a node or an edge means is the knowledge module's.
std/knowledge — Knowledge: the semantic domain, where everything is a claim.
std/collections — The operations over the collection types core declares: membership, filtering, mapping, order, grouping, joins and reductions.
std/string — The functions of a String, in the prelude.
std/seq — The sequence, set and map operations beyond the core's membership, order and lookup, in the prelude.
std/math — Numbers, in the prelude.
std/option — The ways out of an Option<T>, in the prelude, each stating what absence gives.
std/result — The ways out of a Result<T, E>, in the prelude, each stating what a failure gives.
std/regex — Text matched against a regular expression.
std/format — The formats, how bytes are read as values and how values are written as text, and the codec contracts over them.
std/io — Input and output: endpoints, the data sources read from them, and the data targets written to them.
std/io/net — Network endpoints: transports, read and written by source, tap, target and sink like any other endpoint (module io).
std/io/logging — Logging: structured events written to a destination, apart from the result.
std/vault — The current vault: the source a program runs against.
search/lexical — Lexical retrieval: a corpus ranked by the words it shares with a query, a hashed bag of words compared by cosine.
search/semantic — Semantic retrieval: a corpus ranked against a query by vectors a language model made ahead of time, read from the index that [semantics] index in hql.toml names.
std/validators — Validators: the standard validator types, imported where they are used, import validators, and never by the prelude, so a program's own Email is its own.