Commit Graph
7 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 afda6ca83b Finishing says nothing, which is what finishing looks like
The shell printed "finished" every time a program gave the machine back.
That made sense when starting a program and getting the machine back was
most of what the machine did and the prompt was the only other thing on
the screen. Under a listing, between two commands, it is noise.

And it was printed whatever the program made of it, so a program that had
just explained what went wrong was answered with the word "finished" -
"there is no such directory: nowhere" and then, immediately, "finished".

The prompt coming back is what says a program is over. It is the same
argument osLastStatus is made of: a program that failed has already said
so in words, and anything the shell adds beside that is the shell talking
over it. A program that FAULTED still says so, because the fault screen
printed in red above and a program that is gone should not look like one
that ended.

A NEWLINE ONLY IF ONE IS WANTED. A program that stopped part way along a
line would leave the prompt sitting in the middle of its last output,
which the word used to prevent by accident. The console knows which
column the cursor is in, so the shell asks - where a blank line printed
every time would be right about half of the time, and an empty directory
listed with ls would be followed by a blank line for no reason.

Fifty nine recorded sessions lose the word. Two of them move a cursor up
a row with it, which is the same fact seen from the screen.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-06 19:49:43 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 323d7a0330 A listing says what is left of the disk, and what will fit
dir said what was there and nothing about what was left. SplitDisk has
printed the free figure since it was written, so the machine's own
listing was the poorer of the two implementations at describing the same
disk.

  43 files, 3 directories
  46 of 64 entries, 1893 blocks free

Entries first, because they are the ceiling nobody notices until they hit
it: a disk of small files runs out of directory slots long before it runs
out of blocks.

COUNTED RATHER THAN ASKED. The superblock keeps a free count and this
file calls it "a note rather than the truth" in three places. sbfsSpace
reads the whole directory table instead, which costs a read per directory
block and is the answer rather than a guess. SplitDisk goes on reading
the note and saying when it is stale, which is the right place for that
check - the host tool is what you audit a disk with.

---- And it is a fact about the disk, not about where you are ----

The first version added the blocks up as the LISTING walked past them,
which cost no extra read and was wrong: that walk stops only on entries
in the working directory, so the same disk came out as 1,996 blocks free
from the root and 2,025 from /Apps. Comparing against SplitDisk is what
said so, which is what having two implementations is for.

---- The longest run, which is what decides whether a file fits ----

  4 of 16 entries, 37 blocks free
  the longest run is 25

Files are laid down contiguously, so the free total does not say whether
a file will fit. Both implementations learn it, from one specification.

Said only when it differs from the free total. Deleting is what fragments
a contiguous store, and a disk that has only been appended to has one gap
at the end - so on a healthy disk this is silent, and a line that appears
only when something is wrong is a line somebody reads.

There is no sort on this machine and the entries are in no order, so a
candidate walks the disk: each pass finds the used extent nearest at or
after it, and anything the candidate stands inside pushes it to the far
end and starts the pass again. The same trick allocating uses. So it
costs a pass per gap rather than per file - nearly nothing on a disk with
one gap, more the more fragmented the disk is, which is the right way
round.

holes.img is six files with the second and fourth deleted, because no
other disk here can show any of this: none of them has ever had anything
deleted from it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-06 18:19:04 -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 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
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 36ce9f6ccf D3: the machine knows where it is
cd moves it, dir lists the directory it is in, and the prompt says which one -
but only when that is not the root, so a machine nobody has moved about on
looks exactly as it always did and every recorded test that never says "cd"
keeps its recorded prompt.

A path beginning with a separator is measured from the root and anything else
from where the machine is, so a bare name means a file in the current
directory. NO PROGRAM HAD TO BE TOLD: the working directory lives in sbfs.asm
beside the thing that resolves paths, because it is what a relative path MEANS.
Keeping it in the shell would have meant either handing it down on every call
or pasting it onto the front of every name, and the second of those is how a
name that is already absolute gets ruined.

Nothing stores the path. The working directory is an entry index and two bytes,
and the text on the prompt is built each time by walking the chain of parents
upward, writing names from the end of a buffer towards the front - which is the
order they arrive in, and saves reversing them afterwards.

sbfsFind splits into a walk and a check. "cd /" and "cd .." both end at the
root quite legitimately, and had no way to say so through a routine whose only
word for the root was "missing".

Typing a program's name now tries two places in order: where you are, then
/Apps. The first makes a program you are working on the one that runs; the
second lets Snake work from anywhere. A word already beginning with a separator
has said where to look, so only that place is tried.

osChangeDir exists so that "a program may move about, and the shell puts the
working directory back" is a thing that can happen rather than a promise about
nothing. Both halves of that were unfalsifiable without it: with no way for a
program to move, removing the restore changed no test. Wander is the program
that moves - it goes where it is told and reads a file there by a bare name -
and with it on the disk, removing the restore fails.

The remembered file is dropped whenever what a relative path means changes: a
cd, a program calling osChangeDir, a program exiting. Removing all of them
fails the test and removing any one of them does not, because today every path
into that cache belongs to a program that exits. It is kept in all three
because the cost is a call and the failure is a file's blocks being handed out
under another file's name.

The cwd fixture holds two files called notes.txt saying different things, and a
Say.sbx in /A that is really hello. Two copies of one program, or two copies of
one file, would have passed with the whole of this deleted.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 22:22:45 -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 36a1b07b5b D2: the machine walks a path
sbfsFind takes a path where it used to take a name: names with '/' between
them, walked from the root, with '.' and '..'. Each name is looked for among
the entries whose parent is where the walk has got to. A bare name is a path of
one name, so everything written before directories existed still works and
still costs one walk of the directory.

sbfsMount takes either version. On a version one disk every entry has zeroes
where a parent goes and the walk starts at zero, so the comparison always
agrees - which is how a flat disk reads correctly here with nothing done to it.

PROGRAMS DID NOT HAVE TO BE TAUGHT ANY OF THIS. Resolution sits inside
sbfsFind, below the services, so every osFile call keeps its signature and a
path is simply a longer name. Type, More, Edit and the assembler gained
subdirectories without a line changing in any of them.

Four things this turned up, none of which was the path walk:

load copied the path into a buffer sized for a NAME, so anything over 22
characters was cut short - and cut short into a path that often still resolved.
"/Apps/Deep/../../Apps/Say.sbx" became "/Apps/Deep/../../Apps/" and reported
that the program was a directory. That is the whole of what looked like a bug
in '..', and it cost most of the time here.

load on a directory SUCCEEDED. A directory has no blocks, so reading it reads
nothing and leaves the staging area holding whatever was staged last - which,
if that was a program, still says SBEX and still has a working entry address.
It handed back the program before it. Refused outright now.

delete and rename on a directory are refused, and save refuses one up front
rather than failing at the rename and leaving a temporary behind. Deleting a
directory frees an entry index, and a parent IS an index, so the next file
created would take it and inherit the children.

create writes the parent rather than leaving it zero by luck. It would be zero
- delete wipes all thirty two bytes and a fresh entry never had any - but that
is a fact about two other routines, and a file appearing inside a directory it
was never put in is not a failure anybody would think to look for.

dir marks directories and counts them apart from files, because at this point
it was calling them files of no bytes.

Two hazards written down in the design note turned out not to be real, and both
were checked rather than argued about:

The lookup cache holding 22 bytes of a longer path cannot hand back the wrong
file - textSame wants both strings to end in the same place, so a cut down
entry misses. It can never HIT either, though, so every path longer than a name
went to the disk every time; it holds a whole path now.

The allocator stepping over directories changes nothing any test can see. A
directory has no start as well as no blocks, so its bounds are nought to nought
and no candidate begins before it ends. The four instructions stay, with a
comment saying they are not load bearing today and why they are there anyway.

makedisks.sh resolves its build path before it cds. Given a relative one it
carried on and quietly built disks missing some of their files, which is how
the tree fixture lost a file and sent me looking for a bug in '..'.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 19:08:26 -04:00