PropertyValue was number | string | boolean | list. A struct joins it, which
costs two things the typechecker found rather than I did.
An object on a data edge used to mean a live entity, so asEntity would have
taken a struct for one and asString would have read .name off it. EntityHandle
now carries a symbol brand – a symbol so no field name can impersonate it, and
it never serializes, which suits a thing that exists only while the game runs.
It is built in exactly one place.
String(value) would have written a struct as [object Object] at 39 call sites.
They go through textOf(), which is identical for primitives.
normalizeGraph dropped everything but primitives from node params, so the List
node lost its value on every save ([3,1,4] round-tripped to undefined).
Variables were spared: they have a schema, params have none.
A variable could only be a number, a text or a yes/no, so every set of values had
to be smuggled through a string - which is where Tetris got its unreadable
"03066326048763714" colours from. A list is now a value of its own, with an item
kind (number, text, yes/no, colour) that decides how the inspector reads the one
comma-separated line it is typed as, and eight nodes to work with: List, Fill,
Count, Item at, Set item, Sub list, Join lists, Index of.
Two traps came with it. An array is typeof 'object', so every place that told a
value from an entity had to learn the difference, or a list would have been
passed around as a game object. And a value was compared by identity in three
places - with lists that marks everything as an overridden property after each
reload, so those comparisons now compare contents.
There is no list of objects: a list is written to the project file and an object
is a live handle that no reload survives. A set of objects stays a list of names.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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