plutus Assumptions violated by future ledger changes

E.g., in my scripts, I assume that values in UTXOs are non-negative, and that the amount of ADA is always positive. With Babel fees, this will cease to be true. In such cases, will a new language version be released?

Jul 04 '22 23:07 L-as

I agree, it's unclear what we should do here.

Jul 05 '22 13:07 michaelpj

@michaelpj any idea on how to move this forward? Should we get Jared or someone else involved? Should someone come up with a list of assumptions one is allowed to make when working with present-day Plutus? Should someone figure out a process for changing assumptions over time? I'm a bit lost with this one.

Feb 01 '23 22:02 effectfully

I don't know, there's some kind of conceptual question here.

We've mostly operated on the assumption that we should try and be as backwards-compatible as possible. But recently we started e.g. simply not supporting new transaction features in old ledger languages. I could see that argument for doing the same for new eras that change the semantics significantly. On the other hand, there is a risk that that forces us into more new ledger languages than is strictly necessary, which is problematic in its own way.

I think it's an open question what to do .

Feb 02 '23 12:02 michaelpj

If the type of ScriptContext bound it as tightly as possible that would be a good solution, but it would be a very complex type.

Feb 02 '23 21:02 L-as

A lot of important discussion has happened in #4296

Feb 08 '23 18:02 L-as

I believe we need an objective on coming up with a process to figure out

what kinds of things are there to stay (see also the discussion in #4509)
how to handle and report breaking changes (see also the discussion in #5408)

The security of the whole system depends on these things, so it definitely should be prioritized.

Jul 14 '23 16:07 effectfully