Commit Graph
55 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 16f8232a35 Lines that are only run sometimes
if, else, end, and same.

IF TAKES A COMMAND, which is one rule rather than two and is why comparing
values needs no syntax of its own: "same" is an ordinary command that fails when
its two words differ, so "if same $a $b" falls out of the rule instead of being
an exception to it. Anything else that can fail is a question too - "if load
Snake.sbx" is a perfectly good one.

The shell already had the other half. LineFailed exists because a script stops at
the first line that did not work, so every command was already saying whether it
had, for a different reason entirely.

A BLOCK HAS TWO KINDS OF NOT-RUNNING. One where an else would turn it on, and
one where it would not - which is what an if pushes when something above it is
already being skipped. That is what makes nesting need no looking down the
stack: the top of it says everything.

A branch nobody is taking is not even looked at. The skipping happens BEFORE the
names are filled in, so a variable mentioned in a branch that is not running is
not an error - a line nobody runs must not be able to fail.

AND LINES MAY BE INDENTED, which they could not be before there was anything to
indent inside. Nobody writes an if inside an if without indenting what is in
them, and a leading space used to make the first word empty and match nothing.
Found by writing the test script the way anybody would write one.

CALL commandFailed became BRI commandFailed in nine places. It never returns - it
marks the line and branches to the prompt - so calling it was a lie that cost a
Stack frame each time, and fourteen other sites already branched. THE LINT RULE
FOUND THIS, three days after I wrote the rule and on my own code: two false
positives that were really the linter being right about a CALL that is not one.
It does not fix the leak on its own, since a failure inside any called routine
still abandons that frame, but it removes the cause of the commonest case and
makes the code true.

The mechanical edit then left a BRI prompt stranded behind one of them, and the
linter caught that too.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 20:33:33 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 a8707f29f0 Names for things
"set apps /Apps", and then "$apps" anywhere on a later line stands for it. A
name stops where a name stops - letters and digits - so it composes into a path
without anything having to be quoted, which is the whole reason a script would
want one.

THE SUBSTITUTION HAPPENS ON EVERY LINE THE SHELL IS ABOUT TO RUN, typed or read
out of a file, so the two behave the same and no command below has to know that
variables exist. Same shape as the line editing: one place the whole system
already flows through, rather than a decision made twenty times.

A NAME NOTHING WAS SET TO DOES NOT RUN THE LINE. Every other shell expands it to
nothing, and that is the wrong answer here: a mistyped name would quietly become
an empty path, which is the class of silent wrong answer the rest of this system
spends its effort refusing. It says so and the line counts as failed, which
stops a script - and the test proves that by running one, where the line after
it must not appear. Somebody who wants an empty value writes "set name" and gets
one, so the escape hatch exists and has to be asked for.

A NAME TOO LONG IS AN ERROR RATHER THAN A SHORTER NAME. Cutting it off at
fifteen characters was the first version, and it is the same fault wearing a
different coat: two names differing only after the fifteenth would be one
variable, and the complaint about a missing one printed a word nobody typed.

Eight slots of sixty four bytes - sixteen of name, forty eight of value - and
sixty four rather than eighty because A and B are a sixteen bit shift register,
so two rotations turn a slot number into its offset. The same trick the history
uses, and the reason neither needs a multiply this machine has not got.

TWO THINGS I GOT WRONG AND ONE I FOUND:

doSetVar ended in RET. It is BRANCHED to from the dispatch, not called, so that
RET went wherever the Stack happened to point - the same fault that formatted a
disk last week, in a command written three days after the rule was named. The
new lint rule does not catch this shape: it fires on falling INTO a subroutine,
not on a branch target that ends like one.

And a test of the expansion's answer, which is dead code: commandFailed does not
return. It marks the line and branches to the prompt, the way every failure in
this shell is reported, so the only way out of the expansion is the one where it
worked.

Which turned up a real leak, measured and not yet fixed: every failure that goes
through commandFailed abandons the frames between the prompt and the call. SP
goes from FFFD to FE6D over twenty of them, twenty bytes each. Its own commit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 19:23:55 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 b04e4b7d1c Finish making the tune a program
The user's conversion, which I reverted while I was working out whether it was
half done or broken. It was half done: an sbx application wants its #Include
above #Program, because services.asm ends in a #Vectors block and a #Base
written after that has no segment to be the base of.

So the include moves up, the bases move a page with everything else, and the
test starts it from the shell instead of booting it. It plays for 9,469,987
cycles, 9,423,527 of them waiting, which is the same 567 frames of music it
played as a boot image.

BEING A PROGRAM MEANS ITS VECTOR IS THE SYSTEM'S TO INSTALL. It brings the
screen's, so that it has a beat to play to, and CosmOS puts it in when the tune
starts and takes it back out when it stops - a thing a boot image never had to
have right, and the second program here to exercise the version two format at
all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 16:56:17 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3449405b18 Give the system another page of each memory
CosmOS had 1,161 bytes of Program Memory left before the address applications
load at, and Tab completion is not going to fit in that with anything to spare.
So the wall moves up one page: the system keeps below 0x4FFF and 0x2FFF, and an
application is based at 0x5000 and 0x3000.

A PAGE IS A CHEAP THING TO GIVE IT AND AN EXPENSIVE THING TO RUN OUT OF. An
application still has 44K of Program Memory before the vector table and the
largest one here uses 7.5K, so what was taken from applications is space nothing
has ever asked for - while what the system gained is the difference between
building the next thing and counting bytes while building it.

Not doubling, which was the version that would have cost application space worth
minding. One page, and the same again when it is needed.

Nothing in the machine knows where the wall is, so this is 34 #Base lines, one
threshold in the fault handler, and the table in the CosmOS README that
Tests/docs.sh reads its limits out of.

The native assembler's scratch map had to move with it, and docs.sh said so
before anything ran: its data reached 0x40D6 and its buffers began at 0x4000, so
they were sitting on its variables. That file already carries a paragraph about
the floor coming up and the map staying where it was. It has happened twice now,
and been caught by a check the first time wrote.

Twenty three recordings are the same runs a page higher.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 16:49:12 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 66be42d7bb A word the monitor does not know goes to the disk, not into the weeds
There was nothing at the end of the monitor's command list. An unrecognised word
fell off it and straight into sayPrompt - which is a ROUTINE, so its RET had
nothing of its own to return to and went wherever the Stack happened to be
pointing.

The user found it by typing a program's name at the monitor prompt, which is an
entirely reasonable thing to do: the monitor is a mode of the shell, so
everything the shell does is meant to work in it. What they got was a fault, and
before that a second prompt printed on top of the first - which is sayPrompt
doing exactly what it is for on its way past, and the tell that it had been
entered rather than called.

WHERE THAT RET WENT DECIDED HOW BAD IT WAS. Usually 0x0003, in the middle of
newLine, and the machine stopped on a byte that is not an instruction. Once it
was inside sbfsFormat, and the machine formatted the disk it had booted from -
the user's would not start again, and neither would mine, which is how I came to
have a reproduction before I had a diagnosis.

Pre-existing, and not recent: it is there at 2a29ceb and every revision I
checked back through.

The fix is one branch. cosmosMonitorRun covers all three cases the monitor now
has to handle - a program started by name, a program that faults, and a word
that is nothing at all - because the first of those is what the user did and the
last is what used to be fatal.

Worth naming as a shape: a run of tests falling through into a subroutine. The
symptom is not at the site, the failure depends on the Stack, and the damage is
whatever the return address happens to land on. SplitLint has no rule for it and
could have one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 15:30:04 -04:00