When there's no type annotation in a validator handler signature, we
provide default annotation to help the type-checker. However, for
spend's datum and mint policy_id, those annotations mustn't be `Data`,
but rather Option<Data> and Bytearray.
Without that, when no annotation are provided, the compiler infer
invalid types and fails with incongruous errors.
This is a little trick which detects record access and replace them
with a simple var. The var itself is the validator handler name,
though since it contains dots, it cannot be referred to by users
explicitly. Yet fundamentally, it is semantically equivalent to just
calling the function by its name.
Note that this commit also removes the weird backdoor for allowing
importing validators in modules starting with `tests`. Allowing
validators handler to be used in importable module requires more work
and is arguably useful; so we will wait until someone complain and
reconsider the proper way to do it.
Unfortunately, as documented in:
https://github.com/IntersectMBO/cardano-ledger/issues/4571
Some Option fields in the script context certificates are going to
remain set to None, at least until the next Hard fork. There's a risk
that people permanently lock their funds if they expect deposits on
registration credentials to ever be `Some`.
So, we introduce a special type that emulate an `Option` that can only
ever be `None`. We call it `Never` and it is the first type of this
kind (i.e. with constructors indexes not starting at 0).
Without that, we may encounter weird error messages when writing
validators without an explicit `else`. Since we automatically fill it
with a `fail`; without annotation, it unifies to a generic parameter.
The existing check that would look for the body being an error term is
ill-advised as it doesn't work as soon as one adds tracing, or make
the validator a parameterized validator. Plus, it may simply trigger
the wrong behavior as one can now annotate a validator with _whatever_
and get pass the type-checker by plucking a `fail` keyword as body.
The rationale is two folds:
1. It's more consistent with how we already separate the validator
name from its module.
2. Because `_` may be present in Aiken's validator's name, it is hard
to read and I am afraid it could potentially conflict later on. So
it's better to use a separator that cannot appear in validator
names.
Some remains invalid, in particular:
- We need to handle the annotated Data case, which we still parse
correctly but do nothing about any longer.
- There's also a strange behavior with opaque type turned public?
KtorZ