I started work on Decl in February of 2010, according to my notes (the first SourceForge checkin was on February 15, but I'd posted on Wx::DefinedUI on the 10th, and honestly I think a Markov-chained snippet from my earlier writing may have triggered the concept in January), and it quickly grew to take over my every waking thought. Essentially, all my progress with semantic programming has been in the implementation of Decl. As I noted on February 10th, my earlier effort in late 2009 foundered on the shoals of syntax. At least that's no longer a problem.
The idea of Decl is to define semantic domains and tags that declare various types of programming construct, then to build programs of those. Eventually, the semantic domains should have enough macro machinery involved that the programs will largely self-construct, but I'm nowhere near that level of detail yet. I just finished the v1.0 macro system last month, after all, and it's by no means clear how to get from point A to point B.
But that's where things stand. I have done some musing about shoehorning my old Hofstadter microdomain work into Decl - not that that would require much shoehorning at all, which is the raison d'etre of Decl in the first place - but haven't really made a serious move in that direction yet.
I'll leave you with this notion: the Decl tag is an instance of a concept. As such, it's a token from a Lexicon. I haven't implemented the actual Lexicon yet - but at least Decl will be a language capable of expressing it right from the start. And that's why Decl is important.
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