Lakshana (Sanskrit lakṣaṇa लक्षण: a mark by which a thing is known; in the grammarians' use, the defining characteristic — what a thing IS, as against what it happens to contain). A source file's signatures, and its refusal to read anything else. Eight languages are dispatched on — python, typescript, javascript, rust, sql, css, config and markdown — and each returns what a definition means there: parameter types and return annotations for a function, field names for an interface or a struct, variant names for an enum, column names for a table, section headers for a config. IT NEVER READS A BODY: function bodies, string values and data payloads do not travel, and the refusal is PROVEN rather than promised — a fixture carrying one sentinel token fourteen times in Python and eight in TypeScript, in docstrings, bodies, nested payloads, comments, a union member and a private field, yields output in which the token does not appear once. A Rust function under a tauri command attribute is typed `command` rather than `function`, so an app's command surface is read from the ground rather than from a roster. A file recorded as a secret returns nothing before its language is consulted; an unknown language returns nothing rather than a guess; a missing path returns nothing rather than raising, so a survey of a whole tree never dies on one strange file. Read-only, deterministic, no clock, no network, no write, and stdlib only.
Sanskrit lakshana (a mark by which a thing is known; in grammar, the defining characteristic), from a root meaning to mark or perceive; what a thing IS, as against what it merely happens to contain.
What a thing is read from its own defining marks, never from what it merely happens to contain — a definition kept apart from a body.