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So is the language planned to be computationally complete or total?

I was not completely clear on your definition of totality. But I am all for not Turing-complete models of computation that still do useful things.

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For now, just total (i.e: functions can't panic, throw exceptions, etc.). I'd like to explore termination analysis in the future though!

It's an unfortunate conflation between total functions and total functional programming, which is done with non-terminating languages. If I'm reading you right, Tao currently requires functions to be total but is not designed to always terminate.

Yes. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, as it happens! In particular, one of the great benefits of pure languages from an optimisation standpoint is that unused values can always be optimised away, but this is not the case if we treat termination (or non-termination) as a side effect! For now, I'm treating it as not being a side-effect (as does C++, although C++ goes a step further and treats it as straight-up UB in certain conditions). This is something I've still yet to nail down semantically.

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