The first syntax

At this stage we have no Loom-specific syntax at all. This chapter is the genesis of its own: it must name Loom's foundational primitives before it can be read. Loom is written in TypeScript with Effect, in pure functional style — but the syntax it defines is its own.

The very first thing that lets us materialise a Loom program is the arrow. Arrows have a simple and crucial role: they map prose to code.

// Hello! This is the beginning of the Loom language.

Our very first program does nothing but show the rhythm of every Loom program. As you noticed, tildes ~ mark the transition back from code to prose, as the arrow marked the way in. A section holds any number of code and prose blocks, divided by the arrows and the tildes.

That is the whole rhythm. The primitives it rests on, gathered in one place:

1. Chapters ---
2. Sections #
3. Prose
4. Code
5. Arrows => and ~>
6. Tildes ~
7. Sinks [file]
8. Specifiers {Lang}
9. Anchors ::[Name]
10. Warps {{ name = value }}

The chapters that follow give each its shape — first the node every one of them is built from, then the tokens inside a line, the lines themselves, the sections they form, and the corpus above them.