CALL saves A, B and Data Pointers 0 to 2 and nothing else, which is exactly
why Q and DP3 are how a subroutine hands something back. An interrupt saves
all of it, so a service with an answer had to reach into its own frame and
un-save two fields by hand:
MVSD.2
DPUP.2 0d02 ; the saved Q, by an offset it had to know
STA.2
RETI
Thirty places in CosmOS did that. Every one knew the frame's layout by
heart, and all thirty would have gone quietly wrong the day the frame
gained a field - the same duplicated fact this project keeps being bitten
by, except duplicated into thirty places AND into the CPU.
SRET is 0x76, in the seat the block split left for it. It is RETI's frame
with RET's rule applied: A, B and DP0 to DP2 come back, the saved Q and DP3
are dropped, and the Interrupt Flag is restored from the frame - only that
bit, so carry survives a service the way it survives a call, and there is
one rule rather than two. RETI stays exactly as it was: a hardware handler
has nothing to say and must leave no trace.
CosmOS is 10,969 bytes against 11,122, and no handler knows a frame offset.
TWO MISTAKES WORTH RECORDING, both mine, both caught by tests.
The first conversion matched STA.2 with a regular expression that did not
allow a trailing comment, so it ran past the end of one handler and into
the next. The second understood the pattern and still got it wrong: the old
frame write carried the answer from A into the saved Q slot, so simply
deleting the write left Q holding whatever it happened to hold. Services
that answer by calling something were fine - Q already had it - and
services that set A directly silently reported success for every failure.
cosmosCwd is what noticed, by saying "cannot go there" about a directory
that was there. Sixteen handlers move the answer into Q now.
Seven MVQA went with it. They copied Q into A so the frame write could
carry it; SRET puts A back, so they moved a value nobody would ever read.
Anachronaut