FE-013 Hypothesis

Working Hypothesis H-PL-001

Independently developed procedural frameworks can be transformed into canonical procedural trees with a relatively small set of invariant structural constructs regardless of surface terminology.

Supporting Motivation From FE-012C

FE-012C suggested that independently generated analyses often converged on reasoning shape, transition structure, and loop behavior even when literal primitive sequences differed.

That result motivates testing whether procedural frameworks may be more comparable through structural representations than through primitive lists alone.

What Would Strengthen The Hypothesis

• Procedural artifacts produce recognizable AST structure across providers.
• Cyclic and static artifacts produce meaningfully different structural outputs.
• Constraints, loops, and termination conditions are recoverable with moderate agreement.
• AST comparison distinguishes richer procedural artifacts from shallower classificatory artifacts.

What Would Weaken The Hypothesis

• All artifacts collapse into the same AST shape.
• Static artifacts are forced into artificial control-flow structure.
• Outputs depend mainly on artifact recognition rather than blinded content.
• Constraint extraction becomes too subjective to compare.

Why The Programming-Language Analogy Is Useful But Not Assumed True

The analogy offers a disciplined measurement frame:

• source text
• syntax
• abstract syntax tree
• semantic constraints
• execution behavior

FE-013 tests whether this frame is useful for frameworks.

It does not assume that frameworks are literally programming languages.