A thought on order of execution

So I've been thinking about the logic way to handle what, of the top-level items in a program, should actually get run. In my thinking, there are three different types of top-level item. First is just "do" and its friends: pure actions. They always run when at the top level. Second is purely declarative stuff. This never runs anywhere, because it doesn't have a go function.

The third class is both fish and fowl. It will run if necessary, but would rather not - these are items that are really more declarative than anything but that still have a default action, such as documents, URLs, GUI definitions, and so on.

The overall regime that makes sense to me is: 1. Run any preliminary code. 2. Skip any ambiguous code. 3. If there is code after the ambiguous items, don't run those items. 4. If the last item in a program is ambiguous, run it.

This gives us the option of setting things up for an ambiguous item that then controls the program (e.g. prints its document or activates its GUI or whatever). But if there is any action below an ambiguous item, it will be considered a declaration, not an action. I think this really captures what makes most sense to me.

Actually, there are places this should hold even within other items. For example, I'm putting a state machine in a URL. Should the state machine run as the code for that URL or act as a function definition for use later? Good question....