# Phase 7.3 — code exhibits

Six excerpts, **212 lines**, spanning five eras. Evidence that the range behind
the claims is real, in a form an engineer can read in two minutes.

## The rules these follow

1. **Verbatim.** Every file is a byte-for-byte copy from the private archive.
   Nothing is retyped, reformatted or tidied. A retyped excerpt proves nothing.
2. **Never linked.** The archive is not referenced, linked or served from the
   public site. Provenance is recorded as "private archive" and the path is
   withheld from this repository so it cannot leak into a page or a build.
3. **Two sentences on why it is good code.** `rationale` in `manifest.yaml`.
   Not what the code does — that is what reading it is for.
4. **Honest notes.** Where the code is not good, `honest_note` says so. A 2012
   procedural PHP script presented as elegant would undermine every other claim
   on the site.

## The six

| # | Era | Language | Lines | What it demonstrates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flash / ActionScript | AS3 | 36 | class, imports, encapsulation |
| 2 | jQuery + PHP | JavaScript | 42 | easing + timeline core |
| 3 | jQuery + PHP | PHP | 27 | one encode op + the FFmpeg piping |
| 4 | React + TypeScript | TypeScript | 37 | types, interfaces, service layer |
| 5 | Embedded C++ | C++ | 28 | interface split from implementation |
| 6 | Declarative infrastructure | Nix | 33 | a patch with its own removal condition |

Era 6 is the most modern and the least common. A short, correct, self-documenting
derivation that says when to delete itself is a better infrastructure signal than
a thousand lines of configuration.

## Renderer requirements

- Syntax highlighting happens **server-side** (chroma), on the server, at build
  time. The client receives highlighted HTML. No browser-side highlighter.
- Line numbers are generated by the template, not embedded in the files.
- Files stay in `content/assets/code/` as plain text. They are not inlined into
  a Go string, so the archive copy and the served copy cannot diverge silently.
- Total weight: 7 KB of source, which compresses well because it is code.

## Honest notes worth reading twice

- Exhibit 1 contains a latent typo, kept.
- Exhibit 3 is 27 lines out of a 3,400-line file, with one marked elision.
- Exhibit 4 shows the router rather than the schema it types against.
- Exhibit 5 is two files presented as one, because the point is the split.