External facts (and rules?)

[foxfriends]

As an alternative to serializing a data structure and sending it to Lumber as a variable, some data makes more sense to be able to query as predicates (for example, relational data loaded straight from a database). It would be convenient to be able to "serialize" this type of data into the Lumber database as "external facts".

Is there a way to further extend external facts to external rules (or is that even necessary? Is an external rule just a native function?)?

[foxfriends]

External facts may be the same feature as mutable definitions (#16), such that the program can modify the definitions and then they can be deserialized, as an alternative to serializing and deserializing a value.