LNL is a compact, unambiguous, token-efficient language designed for LLMs operating as reasoners, agents, and domain specialists. It targets LLM-internal reasoning, inter-agent communication, and domain-specific annotation - contexts where natural language is too verbose, ambiguous, and semantically under-specified.
English is poorly suited for LLM-to-LLM and internal reasoning use:
- Token inefficiency -- articles, auxiliaries, and redundant syntax consume tokens without adding semantic content
- Ambiguity -- pronoun-heavy, context-dependent, relies on pragmatic inference that may be unreliable across model instances. For example, model A says 'it' referring to X, model B parses 'it' as Y.
- No structured semantics -- conditionality, sequence, causality, and confidence are expressed in prose, forcing models to parse rather than decode
- No dialect separation -- internal reasoning, agent commands, and domain knowledge share the same surface form
- Reduce token count vs. equivalent English
- Eliminate syntactic ambiguity in all core constructs
- Encode semantic relationships (sequence, causation, conditionality, confidence) in grammar, not vocabulary
- Support distinct dialects with shared base grammar
- Remain parseable by current LLMs without fine-tuning (bootstrap phase)
- Semantic preservation in round-trip translation to/from English for human inspection
- Error recovery
LNL defines three dialects that share the base grammar but diverge in lexicon and pragmatics:
Internal Reasoning Dialect (IRD) -- single-model scratchpad, chain-of-thought, hypothesis tracking. Adds $ (fact), ? (hypothesis), %% (working memory), >>rev (revision), DEAD (dead end).
Agent-to-Agent Dialect (A2A) -- task delegation, capability negotiation, result passing, error signaling between LLM agents. Messages are typed (REQ, RES, ERR, ACK, NEG) with explicit sender/receiver, IDs, TTL, and priority.
Domain-Specific Dialect (DSD) -- namespaced vocabulary extensions for fields like code (code:), medicine (med:), law (law:), finance (fin:). Any base operator can be used with namespaced tokens; domains may define shorthand macros that expand to base LNL.
| Approach | Token efficiency | Ambiguity | Structured semantics | LLM-native |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| English prose | Low | High | None | No |
| JSON/XML | Medium | Low | Partial | No |
| Formal logic (FOL) | Medium | Very low | High | No |
| Pseudocode | Medium | Medium | Partial | Partial |
| LNL | High | Low | High | Yes |
Draft v0.1 -- bootstrap phase. Grammar is enforced by convention; formal EBNF spec and tooling are planned. See design.md for full design document including open questions, tradeoffs, and next steps.