0011-a-price-inside-a-sentence-stays-refused.md

0011. A price stated inside a sentence stays refused

• Status: Accepted
• Date: 2026-08-22

Context

smud-ssr, the solar and storage schedule, states its one price in prose rather than in a table:

The Export Compensation Rate effective June 1, 2026 will be $0.0960 per kWh (subject to updates as described in the paragraph below).

Every other charge this parser emits comes from a table shape: a label column and a value column, a heading stating a unit, a row dated by its own text or by the sheet's footer. This is none of those. Reading it would mean finding the label ("Export Compensation Rate", the section title, not anything printed on the priced line itself), the unit (per kWh, readable by the existing unit_tail) and the effective date (June 1, 2026, readable by the existing date patterns) entirely from sentence structure rather than table geometry, for a shape seen exactly once.

tests/test_realdoc.py::test_a_prose_only_schedule_emits_no_charge already asserts, and is named for, the current behaviour: smud-ssr emits zero charges, on purpose, and that is treated as the honest outcome rather than a gap to be closed by more code. This ADR is that decision written down, because the roadmap listed the shape as merely unaddressed and a roadmap entry reads as a standing intention to eventually close it.

Decision

This stays refused, deliberately, not for lack of a rule that could read this one sentence, but because of what closing it would generalise into.

A rule narrow enough to read only this exact sentence would be a rule fitted to n=1: every part of it -- the label coming from the section title rather than the priced line, the parenthetical caveat that the rate is itself provisional pending a formula described three sentences later, the particular verb tense ("will be") -- would be encoded from a single example, with no second document to say which parts of that shape are the general case and which are this document's own phrasing. Every other prose-reading rule in this parser (condition_list.py's intro sentence, cross_reference.py's "Refer to Rate Schedule", applicability.py's exclusion phrases) was written against a phrase repeated across at least two schedules, which is what let the rule be a real generalisation rather than a transcription of one sentence into code that happens to look like a rule.

The parenthetical is a second, independent reason this one stays refused even if a second example turned up tomorrow. "(subject to updates as described in the paragraph below)" states that the number is not a fixed price the way every other emitted charge is: it is a current value of a formula, defined elsewhere, that recalculates on a cycle. Emitting it as an ordinary Charge with a plain effective_from would publish it with the same apparent certainty as a table row that is not provisional in that way, which is the exact difference this parser's citations exist to preserve.

Consequences

• smud-ssr continues to emit zero charges. The existing test that asserts this is not a placeholder for a future fix; it is the specification.
• The roadmap item this closes is removed from "Planned" without a recognizer landing, which is unusual for this log: every prior roadmap item closed by shipping code that reads more of a document. ADR 0002's standing rule is that refusing is preferred to guessing; this is that rule applied to a roadmap item itself rather than to a single row.
• A future document that repeats this same sentence, or one close to it, on a second schedule would be grounds to revisit this decision with an actual generalisation available -- not grounds to guess at one now.