For Agents — Argon Language Reference
This part answers: as an agent writing, debugging, or exploring Argon code, what do I need to know that the rest of the book doesn’t already give me?
The rest of the Argon book is a tutorial walkthrough for human readers. This part is dense, info-rich, agent-oriented reference — designed for fast lookup over linear reading. Each subpage covers one focused concept with a “this page answers:” one-liner at the top and dense cross-links to related pages.
When to read what
| You want to | Go to |
|---|---|
| Look up the syntax for any declaration form | Quick Reference |
| Step-by-step recipes for common modeling jobs | Task Recipes |
Pick between alternatives (derive vs compute, which compute form, etc.) | Decision Guides |
| Pick the right decidability tier | Tier Selection |
| Resolve a specific diagnostic | Error Recovery |
| Avoid an Argon-specific mistake | Anti-Patterns |
| Recognize a canonical Argon idiom | Idioms |
| Integrate via CLI / MCP / IDE / skills | Tooling |
| Look up a term | Glossary |
| Look up a keyword | Appendix A — Keyword Reference |
| Look up an operator | Appendix B — Operator Reference |
| Look up a diagnostic code | Appendix C — Diagnostic Codes |
| Understand the language end-to-end | Foundations, Composition, Beyond |
Scope
This part covers writing and reading Argon-the-language. It does not cover:
- Working on the compiler / LSP / toolchain — that’s the
AGENTS.mdtree at the repo root and per-crate. - Why Argon was designed this way — that’s the RFDs at
/rfd/. - What’s currently shipping or open — that’s GitHub Issues + Releases.
- Compiler-internal API — that’s rustdoc on
oxc.
Pages in this part
- Quick Reference — syntax tables for every declaration form.
- Task Recipes — step-by-step for common modeling jobs.
- Decision Guides — picking between alternatives.
- Tier Selection — the seven tiers and when to use each.
- Error Recovery — common diagnostics and how to resolve them.
- Anti-Patterns — what NOT to do, and why.
- Idioms — Argon’s canonical way to do common things.
- Glossary — terse term definitions with cross-links.