If Yazoo had a favorite philosophy it would surely be reductionism. In its eyes, everything that goes on inside its world can be explained by a very small set of physical laws. For example, functions and sets are translated and executed using exactly the same rules; Yazoo doesn't treat one as a function and the other as a variable because it does not know the difference between the two.
Historically speaking, this reductionist approach was forced from the top down: the author dreamt up a syntax that he liked, then searched for some minimal set of rules that would cause a script written in this ideal syntax to do the right thing when executed. As it turned out, this game would only work if Yazoo was allowed to add a few embellishments to the script at compilation. If we were able to see these little extra snippets of code, they would explicitly show us how sets could be construed as functions and vice versa.
Just to drive home the point that we haven't finished our fundamental theory of Yazoo yet, consider that we don't even have a good account for something as simple as
print("Hello")
The reason is that Yazoo's compiler adorns even this seemingly trivial script with two snips of code that we would only notice if we were to disassemble the script. They represent the two, really the only two, kinds of embellishment from the compiler, so we will be finished with our exposition of Yazoo once we've dealt with each of them in turn.
Last update: July 28, 2013