flow: error model — fail/failed?/fail-reason failure values + 6 tests

Explicit (fail reason) values flow downstream as data and are inspected with
failed?/fail-reason — distinct from raised exceptions (retry/try-catch territory).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

lib/flow/tests/control.sx

@@ -50,4 +50,32 @@
     "(defflow publish (branch (lambda (post) (>= (string-length post) 3)) (lambda (post) (string-append post \" [published]\")) (lambda (post) (string-append post \" [rejected]\")))) (flow/start publish \"ok\")")
   "ok [rejected]")
 
+;; ── error model — explicit (fail reason) values ─────────────────
+(flow-ctl-test
+  "fail: failed? is true for a failure value"
+  (flow-c "(failed? (fail 404))")
+  true)
+(flow-ctl-test
+  "fail: fail-reason extracts the reason"
+  (flow-c "(fail-reason (fail 404))")
+  404)
+(flow-ctl-test
+  "fail: failed? is false for a plain value"
+  (flow-c "(failed? 7)")
+  false)
+(flow-ctl-test
+  "fail: failed? is false for an ordinary list"
+  (flow-c "(failed? (list 1 2 3))")
+  false)
+(flow-ctl-test
+  "fail: a node may emit a failure as data"
+  (flow-c
+    "(defflow validate (lambda (s) (if (>= (string-length s) 3) s (fail (quote too-short))))) (failed? (flow/start validate \"hi\"))")
+  true)
+(flow-ctl-test
+  "fail: failure flows downstream, branch recovers"
+  (flow-c
+    "(defflow guarded (sequence (lambda (s) (if (>= (string-length s) 3) (string-length s) (fail (quote too-short)))) (branch failed? (lambda (f) (list (quote recovered) (fail-reason f))) (lambda (n) (list (quote ok) n))))) (flow/start guarded \"hi\")")
+  (list "recovered" "too-short"))
+
 (define flow-ctl-tests-run! (fn () {:total (+ flow-ctl-pass flow-ctl-fail) :passed flow-ctl-pass :failed flow-ctl-fail :fails flow-ctl-fails}))