Mad Max Middle-earth: Shadow of War Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Yakuza: Like a Dragon

How is this different from backtracking? You're doing a depth-first search over possible interpretations. The grammar is just expressed in the type system instead of usual spec formats.

Critiques in other comments are accurate. This is a tooling nightmare, but also probably a nightmare to read. Consider an expression like

  2026 March 10 to 13

A grid can have unwanted aliasing effects. It all depends on the kinds of images you're working with.

  * You want your program to crash on any I/O error because you wouldn't handle them anyway
  * You value the programming convenience of being able to treat a file on disk as if the entire thing exists in memory
  * The performance is good enough for your use. As the article showed, sequential scan performance is as good as direct I/O until the page cache fills up *from a single SSD*, and random access performance is as good as direct I/O until the page cache fills up *if you use MADV_RANDOM*. If your data doesn't fit in memory, or is across multiple storage devices, or you don't correctly advise the OS about your access patterns, mmap will probably be much slower

You avoid an unnecessary copy. Normal read system call gets the data from disk hardware into the kernel page cache and then copies it into the buffer you provide in your process memory. With mmap, the page cache is mapped directly into your process memory, no copy.

All running processes share the mapped copy of the file.

There are a lot of downsides to mmap: you lose explicit error handling and fine-grained control of when exactly I/O happens. Consult the classic article on why sophisticated systems like DBMSs do not use mmap: https://db.cs.cmu.edu/mmap-cidr2022/

First, if it uses PRNG with a fixed-size state, it isn't accurate to say it never repeats, correct? It will be periodic eventually, even if that takes 2^256 operations or more.

Second, can you go more into the potential practical or theoretical advantages? Your scheme is certainly more complicated, but I don't see how it offers better tamper protection or secrecy than a block cipher operating in an authenticated mode (AES+GCM, for instance). Those have a number of practical advantages, like parallel encryption/decryption and ubiquitous hardware support.