Step a Data Pointer with INCD and DECD, not DPUP and DPDN by one

DPUP takes an immediate, so an offset of one is legal and does exactly the
right thing. It is also three bytes where INCD is two, and reads as "offset
the pointer up by one" where INCD reads as "step the pointer".

56 of them across 15 files: the system, the assembler, the editor, and eight
test programs. CosmOS is 9,564 bytes to 9,537, the native assembler 11,648
to 11,635, and every program in the repository together 49 bytes lighter.

The worst offender was numbers.asm, written this week, where every sixteen
bit helper reaches the low byte and comes back the long way round. It is the
file every other part of the assembler includes, so it is the first thing
anybody reads when they go looking - and it was teaching them the long way.
Pattern matched off sbfs.asm rather than off the instruction table I had
just embedded in two programs.

THIS IS NOT TWO WAYS TO DO ONE THING. DPUP takes an arbitrary number, so one
is inevitably among them; INCD earns its place by making the common case a
byte cheaper. The overlap is structural and the choice is a usage question,
which is a linter's job rather than an ISA's - "DPUP.n 0d01: INCD.n does
this in a byte less" is a mechanical rule with no judgement in it.

Nothing needed re-recording, which was not a foregone conclusion: cosmosBreak
prints the system addresses the registers happened to hold, and they did not
move. Both assemblers still produce identical bytes and CosmOS still builds
itself to a fixed point.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-08-21 18:16:27 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 12cb489268
commit 4fd8bf7b3f
15 changed files with 56 additions and 56 deletions
+5 -5
View File
@@ -262,7 +262,7 @@ dirCheck:
; A file's length is its block count times 256 plus its tail, which is the block count
; in the high byte and the tail in the low one. Nothing has to multiply anything.
SETD.0 SbfsFileBlocks
DPUP.0 0d01
INCD.0
LDA.0
SETD.1 DirSize
STA.1
@@ -1281,14 +1281,14 @@ breakAddress:
SETD.0 SRegText
PSHD.3
POPD.1
DPUP.1 0d1
INCD.1
CALL breakByte
; And which bits of it those are, since a debug dump that makes you look the number up is
; only half of one. Halt is not among them: the machine is plainly not halted.
PSHD.3
POPD.1
DPUP.1 0d1
INCD.1
LDA.1
PSHA
INIB 0x01
@@ -2283,12 +2283,12 @@ assembleNeedsValue:
; DP0 is a two byte address and A is how far to move it on.
stepCursor:
DPUP.0 0d01
INCD.0
LDB.0
CCF
ADD
STQ.0
DPDN.0 0d01
DECD.0
LDA.0
RSTB
ADD