Every variant-index lookup miss (-1) was silently clamped to tag 0
across both stages: tagged return (value + bare-void), widen store
(struct/slice/str/float/scalar arms + push fast path + field store),
widen tag-remap (identity scan + emit loop), match case compare,
is/as typetest, tryprop error remap, and the alloc-nomem propagation
(clamped to 1). All misses are checker-rejected upstream today, so
the clamps were dead -- but any future checker/cgen seam gap would
mis-tag silently (wrong arm, wrong error, false success). Rule 7:
each site now hard-stops with a per-construct diagnostic; nullable
arms keep their raw -1 by design (a miss encodes the void polarity
for `case null`). Corpus asm byte-unchanged; bootstrap fixed point
holds.
Hojun-Cho
57d33acd1f