Jac's documentation introduces vocabulary the way the language's design does:
a small set of precise terms, each defined once on a canonical page and
repeated verbatim everywhere else. This page collects them in one place,
grouped in the order the argument builds them, one line apiece, with a link to
the page that carries each term's full statement. A star (★) marks the eight
terms coined in Jac's research literature. The defining pages remain the
arbiters; nothing here supersedes them.
A boundary at which the representation of meaning must change and over which no verifier has jurisdiction; the site at which glue accrues and defects pool.
A runtime, the ecosystem importable at it, and the toolchain that builds and ships for it. A tier is a substrate, a foreign ecosystem is a substrate, and the LLM is a substrate whose executor is stochastic.
A language is synechic if it presents a single continuous semantic medium across conventionally discrete ecosystems, tiers, and toolchains, such that no program point requires glue code, marshaling, or interop scaffolding to cross a substrate boundary.
Semantic annotations from which prompts are automatically synthesized, making delegation of program logic to large language models (by llm()) a typed language feature rather than string engineering.
Memory discipline as a continuum within one language: managed semantics by default, ownership adoptable one declaration at a time, and a checked boundary mediating every value that crosses between the regimes.
The four-position surface through which gradual borrow checking is adopted, per module: managed, annotated, enforced, headerless, with guarantees strengthening monotonically.
A language is topokinetic if the mobile locus of computation over a topology of data is a first-class semantic construct, inverting the von Neumann convention of streaming data to a fixed site of computation.
The concrete paradigm realizing topokinesis: programs expressed as walkers traversing a persistent topology of nodes and edges, with abilities triggered by arrival.
The persistence rule of the topology: a datum is durable exactly while a path connects it to a root, the same reachability a tracing collector consults for liveness.
A compiler whose unit of compilation is the whole polyglot application, whose targets are ecosystems rather than instruction sets, and whose optimization surface includes the boundaries between them.
The presentation of a collection of processes, machines, and users as one continuous machine: the same semantics at service scale as in a single-process script.
The claim that the synechic and topokinetic classes are independent in definition and compounding in value: the deepest dissolutions require a member of both at once.
The peer-reviewed foundations behind these terms are collected on
Research & Papers.