Core tools for minting code.
Mint stands for "Meta-INTerface".
Minting is core technique of i2i: It can be seen as the encapsulation of a construct’s interface into a (data) structure that contains everything one needs to know about the construct to perform a specific action with or on the construct.
A little note on the use of “encapsulation”. The term is widely used in computer science, and is typically tied to object oriented programming. Wikipedia provides two definitions:
Though both these definitions apply to minting, the original sense of the word “encapsulate” is even more relevant (from google definitions):
Indeed, minting is the process of enclosing a construct into a “mint” (for “Meta INTerface”) that will express the features of the construct that are essential to the task at hand. The mint provides a declarative layer of the construct that allows one to write code that operates with this layer, which is designed to be (as) consistent (as possible) from one system/language to another.
For example, whether a (non-anonymous) function was written in C, Python, or JavaScript, it will at least have a name, and it’s arguments will (most often) have names, and may have types. Similarly with “data objects”: The data of both JavaScript and Python objects can be represented by a tree whose leaves are base types, which can in turn be represented by a C struct.