Commit Graph
8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 7073b972e6 Say what went wrong, and give the file tools room for a path
The makefile on the disk was fine. "Makefile" is not "makefile", and SBFS names are case
sensitive - but neither tool said so, and both failed in ways that pointed somewhere else.

MORE PRINTED A NUMBER THAT MEANT NOTHING. "cannot find the file, error 2" invents a
vocabulary the system does not have: the filesystem library documents its answer as zero or
not zero, never as a code, so 2 could not be looked up anywhere. It says "there is no file by
that name" now, which is the only way opening fails that a person can do anything about, and
is nearly always a name typed slightly wrong.

EDIT SAID "0 LINES", which is also what an empty file that IS on the disk says. A name typed
slightly wrong therefore looked exactly like the document you meant to open, right up until
you saved it somewhere new. It says "new file" instead.

Two bugs came out of writing that, and both are worth more than the feature.

The first is mine and the label lied to me: loadNothing is not where a load FAILS, it is
where every load FINISHES, reached at the end of splitLast on files that opened perfectly
well. A flag set there on the strength of the name was set on everything. It is called
loadDone now, and the failure has its own name.

The second is older and general: a program is loaded once and may be run many times, so
"load Edit.sbx" then "run" twice is two sessions over one copy of the Data Segment. Anything
a session changes has to be put back by the session. A zero written in the Data Segment is
the state a program starts in the first time and never again - and cosmosEdit runs Edit twice
from one load, which is why it caught it immediately.

AND THE FILE TOOLS COULD NOT ADDRESS THE TREE THEY NOW HAVE. Edit took 23 characters of name
and More and Type took 29, which were right when everything lived in the root. With the
sources mirrored onto the disk, "/Source/CosmOS/Assembler/classify.asm" is an ordinary thing
to type - thirty-seven characters, cut down to a name meaning something else, or nothing. All
of them take sixty-three now, which is what the shell reads of a command line, so nothing
longer can arrive. Wander with it, since a directory is a path too.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-29 09:24:10 -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
Anachronaut 87d819847e A program can say how it went
SWI osExit takes a status in A, and the shell keeps it. Fifty eight exits
across twenty three programs now say deliberately whether they worked: 25
did what they were asked, 24 did not, 9 were asked wrongly. Compare is the
exception and says so - one there means the files differ, which is a result
rather than a failure, the way diff has always had it.

IN A RATHER THAN Q, which is not a departure from the rule that a service
answers in Q. This one takes an ARGUMENT, the way osPrintNumber takes A and
B, and it never returns to answer anything. A is free precisely because a
return would have put it back - and Q is the ALU's output, so a small
number costs four instructions there against one in A.

The shell does not print it. A program that failed has already said so in
words and a number beside that is noise, so osLastStatus hands it back and
Status is the program that shows it. That indirection is the point: the
number exists for the thing that cannot read words.

MARKING THE EXITS FOUND A DEFECT ON THE FIRST RUN. Type and More printed
why they had failed and then fell through into the success exit, reporting
that all was well. Nobody had noticed, because while the only reader was a
person, the person could see both the complaint and the claim.

Two smaller things. Snake sets the console to line mode and then exits with
zero, and the linter flagged the second RSTA as redundant - an exit status
and a console mode, equal by accident, which is the class that must never
be collapsed. And the README still taught answering by writing into the
frame, three months of habit that SRET replaced yesterday; that section is
gone and the one describing SRET stands in its place.
2026-08-27 19:16:21 -04:00
Anachronaut 9c144469b4 Take the SplitLint findings that are one operation, leave the rest
Twenty four more sites, and the interesting part is which ones were left
alone. A rule emerged while reading them and it held all the way through:
apply where the repetition is INSIDE one operation, skip where the author's
own structure says it is a new thought, and never where two equal values
mean different things.

Taken:

- Five registers reassigned to a value they already held, where both are
  the same quantity: two masks in one expression in Snake, two spaces
  printed by the monitor, both halves of block zero in waitTest, and a RSTA
  in Pour that the very next instruction overwrote.
- Eighteen SETDs that reload a pointer inside one operation - a store back
  into the variable just read, or an INCD stepping to the second byte of a
  two byte value. Those read correctly without the reload.
- sbfsNext, which branched to the label on the line below it.

Left, with reasons that are the useful part of this:

- Eight registers where the same number means two different things. CosmOS
  and the loader set A to 1 for a blit command and then to 1 again for a
  bank number; Asm compares a type against 3 and then a status against 3.
  Removing those couples one quantity to another that is equal by accident
  and would part company silently.
- Ten RSTAs that open the RSTA/RSTB/CCF/ADD "return zero" block. The
  redundancy is what makes that idiom self contained; taking it out makes
  the return value depend on the line above.
- Eleven SETDs that begin an arm of a comparison chain. Each arm loads,
  compares and branches, and they get reordered - the repetition is the
  reason a new arm can be dropped in anywhere.
- Twenty five SETDs separated from their pointer by a blank line or a
  comment, which is the author saying a new thought starts here.
- Two CCFs before arithmetic, which this codebase writes unconditionally.
- Three redundant branches in test programs whose recorded output includes
  addresses, where three fewer bytes moves what the test demonstrates.

Nine recorded outputs moved and every one is a size in a listing or, for
Life, five more generations inside the same cycle budget. Behaviour is
unchanged everywhere: cosmosSnake and cosmosEdit pass byte for byte while
Snake loses eight bytes and Edit twelve.

CosmOS is 10,902 bytes of program against 10,937, and the native assembler
12,173 against 12,183. The CosmOS README's size for Edit moved twice in one
sitting, and this morning's check caught it both times - which it could not
have done before that claim was reworded to name what it was about.
2026-08-26 18:02:35 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 588e02aff5 Double CosmOS's half of the machine, and check that it fits
The memory map gave CosmOS 0x0000 through 0x1FFF of Program Memory and
applications 0x2000 and above. CosmOS is 8141 bytes at the previous commit,
which is fifty one bytes short of the line, and the next thing added to it
went over.

GOING OVER DOES NOT FAIL WHERE IT HAPPENS. Nothing enforces the division: an
application says where it goes with #Base and the loader puts it there, so a
CosmOS that has grown past 0x1FFF simply has the next program loaded written
over the end of it. What breaks is whichever part of the shell that program
happened to cover, at whatever later moment somebody uses it. It turned up here
as the monitor's assemble command answering "I do not know" to valid
instructions, several commands into a session, on a machine that had booted
perfectly well.

Both halves are doubled: applications now start at 0x4000 in Program Memory and
0x2000 in Data Memory. That is 16K of code and 8K of data for the system,
against the 8775 and 2948 it uses today. Both were on the same trajectory, and
moving them together means the twenty files that say #Base are edited once
rather than twice.

The standalone loader's loadable.asm keeps its old base: it belongs to the
loader CosmOS grew out of, not to CosmOS, and its addresses answer to a
different program. The unbased-segment diagnostic keeps its old base too - it
exists to produce an error message that names the address, and the message is
what is recorded.

Tests/docs.sh now reads the two limits out of the table in the README and
measures both segments against them. It reads them rather than being told them
because the table is the specification, and this is the second time in this
project that the thing nobody checked is the thing that rotted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 22:21:02 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 4fd8bf7b3f 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
2026-08-21 18:16:27 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3e87a67809 Edit: use the system's services instead of carrying the filesystem
The editor included sbfs.asm and console.asm, which was 3235 of its 4941
bytes. Both come out: reading and writing a file, printing and reading a
line are services now, and sbfsMount goes entirely because the system has
already mounted the disk. Only text.asm remains, at 357 bytes, because
textSame and textNumber own nothing and touch no device - sharing those is
a linker's job rather than an operating system's.

4941 bytes to 1983, a little better than predicted because dropping the
mount and the blocks-and-tail arithmetic went with the library rather than
being translated.

ConsoleEndOfInput went with console.asm, so the end of input is now read
from the console status port. That is better than what it replaced: the
port is there whether or not the system is.

Nothing it does changed, and that is checked rather than asserted. The
recorded output of the cosmosEdit test does not move by a single byte
across this commit - a test written days before the rewrite, checking a
property rather than an output, and therefore able to verify a change it
knew nothing about.

One thing is lost and worth naming: there is no way to ask whether a disk
is present, so the editor's "there is no disk" message is gone. On a
diskless machine it now opens an empty document and fails at w instead. The
shell already refuses to load without a disk, so the editor cannot normally
be reached that way.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 18:19:51 -04:00
Anachronaut e3100b4718 Fixed assembler bug that caused crash on IR array resize. Added line editor app. 2026-08-17 23:26:21 -04:00