Commands
Commands are named with several objectives in mind. Congruence with the SX command set and brevity are important considerations, but in many cases these have taken a back seat to internal consistency and transparency.
Commands are generally named so that related commands sort together. In the case of network commands (fetch-, send-, validate- and watch-) the command's action (verb) starts the name. In other commands (e.g. tx-, address-) the primary data type (noun) starts the name. This distinction is primarily based on the congruence objective and also tends to read more naturally.
Commands that convert from one data type to another are named using the "input-to-output" nomenclature. In certain cases the second data type is implied and the -encode/ -decode suffixes are used instead. This distinction is a nod to the congruence objective.
Commands that hash data are named only with the type of hash. In these cases the data type of both the input and the output data type is Base16. As is the nature of hashing, these operations are not reversible and are therefore singletons.
Commands pertaining to stealth addresses are prefixed with stealth- to differentiate them from bitcoin address commands.
Commands preixed or suffixed with validate have a third result code state: invalid (1). This is in addition to success / valid (0) and failure (-1), which may be returned by any command.
Commands suffixed with -new create a new instance of whatever type is specified in the command. Other command actions (e.g. -set, -sign, -add, -multiply, -uncover) are unique to the contexts in which they are defined.
The following diagrams show the full set of commands, input/output data types and relationships. Commands are grouped according to metadata categorization.
Commands pertaining to bitcoin keys and payment addresses.
Commands pertaining to stealth payments and addresses.
Commands pertaining to manipulation of transactions, excluding network calls.
Commands pertaining to signing and verifying arbitrary messages.
Commands that communicate on the bitcoin network.
Commands pertaining to encoding data to and from the various bitcoin formats.
Commands pertaining to hashing data in the various bitcoin formats.
Coin conversion and commands that perform secp256k1 elliptic curve math.
