Commit Graph
3 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 4d976fc22a A program reading a line gets the editing too
osReadLine goes through the shell's editor now, so anything that asks the system
for a line gets arrows, Home, End and Delete. The editor is a program, and a word
typed with two letters the wrong way round can be put right without starting the
line again.

IT DOES NOT GET THE HISTORY, and that is the interesting half. Edit would
otherwise fill the history with the text of somebody's document, and pressing Up
in the middle of writing one would put "dir" into it. The history belongs to the
thing whose lines are commands. Two entry points rather than a flag the caller
sets first, so a caller cannot forget which it wanted.

And the console is put back the way it was FOUND rather than the way the shell
likes it. A program that had asked for key mode and then read a line through the
system used to be handed back a console in line mode having asked for nothing of
the sort. The status port reports all three things the control port can ask for,
in the same order two bits along, so one shift turns what the console IS into
what to write to make it that again.

Which uncovered a real fault in the console. READING THE STATUS PORT WAS EATING A
KEY: in line mode the poll consumed an arrow key and dropped it, so a program
that looked and then asked for key mode - exactly what reading a line now does -
found the first key it was reaching for already gone. A look must not consume
what it cannot report, because the mode can change. It is held now and delivered
as soon as something will take it. A blocking read still discards it, and must:
that read IS the delivery, and a byte held there would be met again forever.

Four recordings gained a program's echo, and cosmosEdit's went from
"> : : : : > : : > 1: alpha" to a session you can read. VERIFIED THE SAME WAY AS
BEFORE: with only the program side of the echo silenced, all 192 tests pass
against the recordings as they were before this commit, so the echo is the whole
of what changed.

cosmosEditService is the new test and it checks both halves at once. Inside Edit,
Left/Delete/Left puts "alpah" right. Up and Down do nothing there - were a
program's line walking the shell's history, the next line would come out as the
echo command from the top of the file instead of the word. And one press of Up
back at the prompt finds the command typed before Edit was started, which is the
proof that nothing the editor read went into the history at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 14:07:09 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 736037462e The shell edits the line it is given
Three different things used to do this job, and which one you got depended on
where the machine was running. On a terminal the host held the line and did the
echoing and the backspacing; behind a window the console's own gatherer did it;
from a file nothing did it at all. One job, three implementations, none of them
in the system - which is why there was no way to move about in a line and
nowhere for a history to live.

So editLine does it. Key mode while a line is being read and line mode straight
after, so nothing else in the system and no program calling osReadLine notices
anything changed. Left and Right, Home and End, Backspace for the character
before the cursor and Delete for the one under it, and anything typed goes in
where the cursor is with the rest of the line moving along.

Ctrl-D means the end of input again, on an empty line, because that was a thing
the terminal did while it was holding the line and it is not holding it now.
Same trade as the echoing.

MOST KEYSTROKES DRAW NOTHING BUT THEMSELVES. A character typed at the end of a
line needs no cursor moved: printing it is the whole change, and a backspace
there is three ordinary bytes. That matters beyond speed - moving the cursor by
hand is what a terminal is TOLD about, in an escape sequence, so redrawing on
every keypress would fill every recorded transcript in this suite with them.
The line is only reprinted when something happened in the middle of it.

Where the line STARTS is worked out backwards from where printing ended, rather
than trusted from what was remembered. That is what makes it survive the screen
scrolling: a line printed on the bottom row moves everything up by one, and a
remembered row would be one too low from then on.

The command line holds 127 characters, up from 63. The limit started to be felt
the moment a line could be moved about in.

58 recordings changed, and every one of them by the echo. THE PROOF IS NOT A
HEURISTIC: a CosmOS built with the echo silenced reproduces 187 of the 188
recordings byte for byte. The one exception is cosmosTyped, the backspace test,
where the rub-out marks now come from the shell instead of from the console's
gatherer - same marks, different author.

cosmosEditKeys is the new test, and every line in it is typed wrong and then
corrected with a different key. Its last line is eighty six characters at a
prompt in column two on an eighty column screen, so the line runs onto the row
below and the shell has to find the start of something it can no longer see;
breaking either half of that arithmetic fails it.

Also: agree.sh looked for "> the same", anchored to a prompt that no longer
precedes what a command prints.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-31 23:01:55 -04:00
Anachronaut 89c667848b Edit read a file into a buffer it never checked the size of
Opening hello.asm showed a thirty one line file as three, one of them cut
short. Opening it again hung the machine: the emulator kept running and
nothing ever answered.

Entry is the buffer a line is read into, and it is followed in memory by
TextHead and ArenaFree - the head of the document, and the pointer its line
allocator hands out. The loop that splits a file into lines copied
characters in WITH NO BOUND AT ALL, so a 94 character line wrote thirteen
bytes over both of them. The list head then pointed into the middle of the
text and the allocator handed out an address inside the file, which is why
the second open walked a list that led back into itself for ever.

Typing was always safe. osReadLine is told how much room there is, so a new
document behaved perfectly and a source file did not - which is exactly how
the user found it, and why it looked like a mystery rather than a bug.

The bound is there now, and the buffer is 128 characters: what a line is
everywhere else on this machine, the same number configuration files use,
rather than a second answer to a question already answered. hello.asm fits.

A file with a longer line is REFUSED rather than shortened. This is an
editor - a line cut on the way in would be written back cut, and the file
damaged by having been looked at. It says so and exits with a status of
one, which it can do since this afternoon; the file is byte identical
afterwards, and the test checks that.

Opened twice in the test, because once is not enough to see it: the first
open does the damage and the second is what never returns.

This is the third time this shape has turned up: a buffer written past its
end into the variables that happened to follow it. The prompt walked off
CwdText into the shell's own command names; the assembler's output ran into
its label table. Every one was found by a person using the machine.
2026-08-27 19:41:51 -04:00