Last time I showed how an agent discovers the available APIs at runtime using the discover verb. But one question remains unanswered: how does a cold-start agent that has never seen the language before discover discovery? You need to know the language in order to write a program, so how is this chicken-and-egg problem solved?
It turns out that there exists, in fact, one particular program an agent can submit without either knowing or guessing the grammar.
The empty program
When a Neander runtime like Grotto receives the empty program, it is not treated as a syntax error but as valid input. The specification requires the runtime to answer with a special response envelope that contains the Neander Reference document explaining the language, plus the runtime's current configuration.
{
