S2: the assembler writes the file as it makes it

The output image is gone. It was eighteen kilobytes and it is now one block of
window, because the file was always produced in order and only ever needed to
be written that way.

Everything works in FILE OFFSETS now. A cursor is a two byte number counting
from the front of the file, and since a block is two hundred and fifty six
bytes, the block it lands in is the offset's high byte and the place within that
block is its low one - so there is no division anywhere, and ImgWalk, ProgPut
and DataPut needed no change but where they start.

ONE WINDOW RATHER THAN THREE. The plan said three: one per segment, and a third
for the block where the program ends and the data begins, which belongs to both.
Fetching a block back instead makes all of that one case. The header is patched
after every byte is out, the boundary block is written by both cursors, and both
are simply revisits - a revisit is what fetching handles. osFileFetch is the
service that allows it, and is the read side of the write.

A run of bytes in one segment costs nothing extra; a switch between segments
costs two block operations, and a source file has a few dozen switches and
several thousand bytes.

Two bugs, both a pointer meaning two things:

putAt took the cursor to advance in DP2 and then wanted DP2 for the window's
address. A call puts DP2 back the way it was AT THE CALL, so the step at the end
moved whatever the last call had left there - the window walked off across
memory while the cursor stood still. It goes in memory now, like the block did
in S1, and for the same reason.

The size the file is created at could not be right. How many vectors are
actually installed is not known until the second pass has resolved their
handlers, and by then the file must already exist to be written into - so Keys,
which brings one vector, came out four bytes short. Teaching the first pass to
count them meant teaching it about devices, and about a Boot line in a loadable
program not being installed at all, which is two ways to disagree with the
second pass about what a file contains.

So osFileDone is told the size instead. A writer asks for as much as the file
could possibly come to - the whole of it plus four bytes for every vector
DECLARED, which no file can exceed - and says what it really came to at the end.
The blocks it did not use go back to the free count. Asking for too much costs a
moment; asking for too little writes off the end of a file.

That is a better service for it, not a workaround. A writer that cannot know its
size until the last byte is the ordinary case, and it is exactly the case this
whole rung exists for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
This commit is contained in:
Anachronaut
2026-08-25 16:58:17 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 9f7dffdeca
commit fb7b224bbb
8 changed files with 505 additions and 46 deletions
+10
View File
@@ -98,6 +98,16 @@ theTail:
SWI osFileWrite
BNQ writeFailed
; And how big it turned out to be, which here is what was asked for: this one knows its
; size from the start. Something that did not - an assembler, say - would ask for more
; than it needed and say the truth here.
RSTA
PSHA
SETD.0 Blocks
LDA.0
PSHA
POPD.3
INIA 0d40
SWI osFileDone
BNQ doneFailed