Commit Graph
122 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
Anachronaut 2b5506ee70 Stop the prompt writing off the front of its own buffer
The prompt is the working directory's path, worked out each time by walking
the chain of parents up to the root. The names arrive deepest first, so
they are written backwards from the end of a 127 byte buffer - and nothing
bounded that walk.

Nothing bounds the depth either. A path given to one operation is capped at
95 characters and a 22 character name, but "mkdir a" and "cd a" are each
far inside that and can be repeated forever. Six directories of 22
characters is 132 characters of path, and at that point the walk wrote down
past the front of CwdText and into what the assembler had laid out below
it: the shell's own command names. ExitName sits five bytes under, so the
word "exit" went first and the shell stopped recognising the command for
leaving. Measured, not deduced: fine at five levels, gone at six.

The walk now counts the room it has left, byte by byte, and stops. What is
already written is the DEEP end of the path, which is the end worth
showing, so it is cut at the front and three dots say so - out of three
bytes held back from the count, so there is always somewhere to put them.
Twenty levels deep the prompt shows the last five and every command still
works.

cosmosDeep records that, and records it by running help, cd and exit from
down there rather than by looking at the prompt: a wrong prompt is
cosmetic, and this was writing into other variables. It fails with the
bound removed. The tree is built by SplitDisk because a path that long
cannot be given to mkdir in one piece - which is the same fact that makes
the depth unbounded.

The three path limits are written down in the README now, including which
one actually binds. The other two do not: the longest path on a full
install is 21 characters.
2026-08-25 23:35:33 -04:00
Anachronaut ce8fb721fe Say a temporary is one in the entry, not in its name
Saving something that already exists writes a temporary, deletes the
original and gives the temporary its name, so that nothing is lost if the
writing fails. The temporary was told apart from a real file by being
called sbfs.part or sbfs.out - and those are legal names. Starting a save
deleted whatever answered to one as stale scratch, so saving anything at
all in a directory destroyed your own file of that name there, silently.

Flag bit 0x04 now says it. The property is not in the contents - the same
bytes become the finished file the instant the rename lands - so it belongs
in the entry, which is the thing the commit changes. sbfsCreateTempAt is
the door temporaries come in by, the commit writes the flags flat along
with the name, and cleanup wipes what it finds only if the entry says it is
ours. Anything else stops the save instead.

The bit is also the recovery. Both listings show an unfinished write rather
than sizing it, because the size in the entry is the room that was asked
for and not what was written: "<unfinished>" from dir, and a line from
SplitDisk saying the blocks are held and a rename brings the data back.
That was the gap in what the last commit documented - the data survived a
crash and nothing would show you where it was.

Four new agreement checks, three of which fail with the guards removed. The
fourth needed rebuilding first: both tests started on one disk, and the
first save ate the sbfs.part that was the second test's SOURCE, so the copy
failed for want of a file, never opened a stream, and passed while
reporting on nothing. A disk each. The fifth check forges the wreckage by
setting the flag on a finished file, since nothing here can crash a save
half way through.

No version bump: a committed file never carries the bit, so a disk this
writes is byte for byte the disk the old code wrote, which the whole-image
comparisons confirm. Only the wreckage differs, and older code reads that
as an ordinary file - which is what it did before.
2026-08-25 23:22:37 -04:00
Anachronaut 9e2aa0122e Say what a safe save actually promises, and where it stops
Both sbfsSaveFile and sbfsStreamDone write a temporary, delete the original
and rename the temporary onto its name, and the README explained why that
order and not the obvious one. It never said what the resulting guarantee
is, which invited the stronger reading: "safe save" sounds like it survives
anything.

It survives everything that goes wrong while it is running - no run long
enough, no free blocks, a refused write, a name that turns out to be a
directory, a writer that gives up - and in all of those the original is
untouched. It does not survive the machine stopping, because the commit is
two block writes with a gap between them: stop there and the old file is
gone and the new one is still called sbfs.part. The bytes are all present
and one rename by hand recovers them, but nothing does that on its own.

Written down in the README beside the ordering it qualifies, and at both
commit points in sbfs.asm, where a reader is when the question occurs to
them. Closing the gap wants a journal or a second directory, which is a lot
of disk for two writes; a boot-time consistency check is the cheaper answer
if it ever matters, and it would want temporaries flagged in the entry
rather than recognised by name.
2026-08-25 22:56:07 -04:00
Anachronaut aa7bdc6acd Check the memory map against itself, not only against the code
The CosmOS README's Data row gave the system 0x0000-0x3FFF and a loaded
application 0x2000 and above: two columns of one row that cannot both be
true. Program was doubled to 0x3FFF when CosmOS outgrew its first map and
that number was copied into the Data row as well, where the answer is
0x1FFF.

docs.sh measured both segments against the CosmOS column and passed the
table anyway, because it never read the column beside it. A number checked
against the code and not against the number next to it is still unchecked,
so it now reads both and compares them - and compares two further copies of
the same fact that had gone stale on their own: the minimal application in
the README, still based where applications lived before the doubling, and
the map cosmos.asm opens with, which somebody reading the system reads
before they read the README.

Each of the three checks was confirmed by breaking the fact and watching it
fail; the first reproduces exactly the text this commit removes. While in
that header, the command list said five commands and CosmOS has eleven and
a search path besides, and "dump is next" outlived the monitor.
2026-08-25 22:54:14 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 db3d349da8 Read the next block while the program is busy with this one
A file is read front to back, so when something asks for a block, the one after
it is almost certainly wanted next. sbfsReadOne asks the disk for it straight
away and hands back the block that was wanted - so the transfer happens while
the caller is busy, and the waiting is mostly over by the time it comes back.

Printing a fourteen kilobyte file: 1,064,498 cycles at two thousand a block
becomes 976,882, and 1,576,562 at ten thousand becomes 1,032,889. The second
figure barely moves between those - seven per cent from an instant disk to a
slow one, where without it the same change costs sixty eight. A machine that
reads ahead stops caring very much how fast its disk is.

NOT FOR DIRECTORY SEARCHES, and that was tried first and thrown away. A scan
stops the moment it matches, so the block it would read ahead is one nobody
will ever look at - a transfer to fetch and another wait to throw away. It was
nineteen per cent SLOWER on a lookup at ten thousand cycles a block. Reading
ahead is a bet that the next block is wanted, and a search is exactly the case
that hopes it is not. The scan loop is untouched.

Three per cent is what it costs when the disk is instant, which is the
bookkeeping with nothing to hide behind it, and the default.

The disk has one buffer, so the only way to know what is in it is to remember
what was last asked for. Every read records that; a write clears it, because a
write fills the buffer from memory and no read asked for what is in it. Getting
that wrong would blit whatever happened to be there and call it the block
somebody wanted.

The read ahead is bounded by the file's own length, so reading the last block
does not fetch whatever follows the file on the disk - which belongs to somebody
else and would be paid for twice, once to fetch and once to discard.

It cost one bug, and an instructive one: the next index was worked out by
stepping SbfsIndex, which is the CALLER'S and is still wanted after the return -
handleFileBlock compares it against the file's length to see whether this was the
short last block. Every block reported the wrong number of bytes, and the output
of Type skipped five lines in the middle. It has a place of its own now.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 22:36:22 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 54f5cfe8a4 Add Copy and Compare, which stream in both directions at once
Copy joins the read and write streaming services: source and destination are
both larger than Data Memory while the program owns one block. Compare reads
two files through separate blocks and ignores the bytes past a short final
block, which belong to neither file. Between them they exercise empty,
exact-block, part-block and 84,000 byte files, and the host extracts the copy
afterwards so that two native programs agreeing with each other is not the only
oracle.

Written by ChatGPT, as their headers record, along with the agree.sh section
and the manifest entry that drive them.

THIS SHOULD HAVE COME FIRST. The commit before it staged whole files rather
than the hunks it meant, so its manifest already names these two programs while
their source was still untracked - that commit will not build on its own. Left
in place rather than rewritten, since the pair is right and only their order is
wrong.

NOTES.md is their review of the streaming work. The first item in it is fixed
by the commit before this one; the rest are still open.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 20:21:43 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 fb7b224bbb S2: the assembler writes the file as it makes it
The output image is gone. It was eighteen kilobytes and it is now one block of
window, because the file was always produced in order and only ever needed to
be written that way.

Everything works in FILE OFFSETS now. A cursor is a two byte number counting
from the front of the file, and since a block is two hundred and fifty six
bytes, the block it lands in is the offset's high byte and the place within that
block is its low one - so there is no division anywhere, and ImgWalk, ProgPut
and DataPut needed no change but where they start.

ONE WINDOW RATHER THAN THREE. The plan said three: one per segment, and a third
for the block where the program ends and the data begins, which belongs to both.
Fetching a block back instead makes all of that one case. The header is patched
after every byte is out, the boundary block is written by both cursors, and both
are simply revisits - a revisit is what fetching handles. osFileFetch is the
service that allows it, and is the read side of the write.

A run of bytes in one segment costs nothing extra; a switch between segments
costs two block operations, and a source file has a few dozen switches and
several thousand bytes.

Two bugs, both a pointer meaning two things:

putAt took the cursor to advance in DP2 and then wanted DP2 for the window's
address. A call puts DP2 back the way it was AT THE CALL, so the step at the end
moved whatever the last call had left there - the window walked off across
memory while the cursor stood still. It goes in memory now, like the block did
in S1, and for the same reason.

The size the file is created at could not be right. How many vectors are
actually installed is not known until the second pass has resolved their
handlers, and by then the file must already exist to be written into - so Keys,
which brings one vector, came out four bytes short. Teaching the first pass to
count them meant teaching it about devices, and about a Boot line in a loadable
program not being installed at all, which is two ways to disagree with the
second pass about what a file contains.

So osFileDone is told the size instead. A writer asks for as much as the file
could possibly come to - the whole of it plus four bytes for every vector
DECLARED, which no file can exceed - and says what it really came to at the end.
The blocks it did not use go back to the free count. Asking for too much costs a
moment; asking for too little writes off the end of a file.

That is a better service for it, not a workaround. A writer that cannot know its
size until the last byte is the ordinary case, and it is exactly the case this
whole rung exists for.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 16:58:17 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 9f7dffdeca S1: the write side learns to stream
osFileStart, osFileWrite and osFileDone are the mirror of osFileInfo and
osFileBlock. A program can now write a file it never holds: Pour writes twelve
blocks and a tail while keeping 256 bytes of it at a time, and the host tool
reads all 3,112 bytes back with every block where it was put.

ONE WRITE IS OPEN AT A TIME AND COSMOS HOLDS IT. Reading needs no state - a name
and an index are the whole question - but writing safely does, because the new
file has to exist before the old one is thrown away and something has to
remember which temporary belongs to which name. Keeping that here means the
careful order is written once instead of in every program that streams.

Nothing already on the disk is touched until osFileDone, so a disk without room
says so while the old file is still there. That is stronger than osFileSave can
manage, where the size is only known once the caller has every byte in hand.
osFileSave stays: Edit and Files hand over whole documents and have no reason to
learn any of this.

osFileWrite refuses an index past the end of the file, and that refusal is not
politeness. Files are contiguous, so block nine of a three block file is a real
block belonging to something else, and writing it would put one file's bytes
inside another with nothing anywhere saying so. Checked both ways: the tail
block is allowed and the one past it is not.

Three bugs, all of them the same shape - a register or pointer used for two
things at once:

DP3 carried the block count in and was popped high byte first, which is the
wrong way round from every reader in the system and made the count two hundred
and fifty six times too big.

sbfsStreamStart took the name in DP0 and then wanted DP0 for something else
before it had read it, so it walked whatever it last pointed at and reported
that it could find no room.

sbfsStreamWrite kept the caller's block in DP3 across a find - DP3 being the
pointer a return does not put back, which is exactly why the find uses it too.
What went to the disk was whatever the scan last looked at. It goes in memory
now, and the file is correct because every block says which block it is; a
check on the length alone would have passed all three of these.

Writing no longer finds the file for each block either. Nothing moves a file
once it is made, so where it starts is settled when the temporary is created.
That was not even slow - a scan stops the moment it matches - but it was a walk
of the directory per block for an answer that cannot change, and it is 28 per
cent of the cost of writing forty blocks.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 14:53:37 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 06bdbf7728 D5: move in, and give the assembler somewhere to look
The demo disk is three directories instead of thirty nine names in one list
with cosmos.asm sitting between fileStream.asm and sbfs.asm:

  /Apps    what you run
  /Source  what you name to the assembler
  /Lib     what those include

The split is by ROLE rather than by which directory the host keeps a file in.
Everything in /Lib is named by an #Include somewhere and by nothing else, which
is what makes it a library rather than a source.

THAT LAYOUT WAS NOT POSSIBLE UNTIL NOW, and finding out why is what this rung
actually cost. An include on the machine was a bare name resolved where you
stood, so every source that calls a service had to sit in the same directory as
services.asm - which is every source worth having. The first arrangement of
this disk put the examples in a directory of their own and none of them would
assemble.

So the native assembler has a search path: beside you, then /Lib. The same rule
the shell already uses for a program it does not recognise, applied to the
thing that reads source, and the same reasoning for it being two fixed places
rather than a list - a list needs somewhere to live between one boot and the
next, and there is no such place yet. It also brings the native assembler
nearer the host one, which has searched -I directories since before there was a
machine to run this on.

The reader's per-file state grew from 293 bytes to 301, because the name it
keeps is a path now and every block of a file is asked for by it. Six of those
would no longer fit the room set aside, so the include list moved up a page.
Both numbers are written down in two places on purpose and both were changed.

dir said cosmos.asm was 17,460 bytes. It is 82,996. The size came out of the
block count's LOW BYTE shifted up and the tail beneath it, which is sixteen
bits, so anything from 256 blocks upward came back as itself less 65,536 - a
plausible number, and wrong. Files that big say their size in blocks now.
Printing the true figure wants decimal printing twenty four bits wide, which is
a page of console.asm to say something nobody reads more precisely than "big".

The Assembler Manual's line about SBFS being flat was the last thing in the
repository still claiming it, and docs.sh now looks for that phrase and three
like it in all four documents. Not a section that is wrong - one clause inside
a paragraph that is otherwise right, which is the shape this kind of staleness
takes.

The duplicate puts are gone with the wildcard that caused them, so building the
disk is quiet.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 10:04:12 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 da91a36d92 D4: the machine makes directories too
mkdir and rmdir are the machine's own now, and a file goes where its path says
rather than always in the root. A disk can be organised without the host tool
touching it.

Everything below the surface works in terms of a directory and a name rather
than a path. sbfsWalkParent splits the last name off, walks the rest, and hands
back the two - and the separator stays on the end of the head, which is what
makes one rule cover every kind of path: "/x" leaves "/", which is the root;
"x" leaves nothing, which is where the machine already is; and "A/x" leaves
"A/", which is neither and needs no special case to say so.

Saving works in those two as well, and had to. The careful order a save uses -
make a temporary, write it, delete the original, rename the temporary - only
works if the temporary is made in the SAME directory as the file, because the
rename at the end changes a name and does not move anything. Renaming to a path
naming a different directory is refused for that reason, rather than quietly
being a lie the disk goes along with.

Three things this cost, all found by running it:

mkdir Apps/Deep made /Apps/Apps. The leaf was worked out into SbfsWanted and
then the head was walked - and walking goes through sbfsPathNext, which puts
every name it meets into SbfsWanted on the way past. The head's last name
landed exactly where the leaf was. It has somewhere of its own now.

rmdir took a directory with something still in it, which is the one failure the
whole design is arranged to prevent. Looking for children clobbered DP2 and
rebuilt it from the buffer and the entry count with the subtraction the wrong
way round, so the pointer walked off the end of the block and found nothing.
The comparison goes through a CALL now, like the two beside it, and DP2 comes
back on the entry because a RET puts it there. SplitDisk's "in use but not
reachable from the root" line is what caught it.

Refusing a name longer than twenty two used to read the twenty third character
of a shorter one, which is somebody else's string. It is measured now.

Tests/agree.sh is new and is the gate this rung was for: the same disk built
twice, once with SplitDisk and once with CosmOS, compared byte for byte. The
two share no code and only a written specification, and every field one writes
and the other only reads is checked there and nowhere else - which entry a
thing lands in, which block, what a directory's unused fields hold, the
version, the free count. It caught a wrong parent immediately when that was
broken on purpose.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-25 09:18:29 -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
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 2b0aeeefd4 Start a program by typing its name
A word the shell has no command for is now looked for on the disk as
"<name>.sbx", and if it is there it is loaded and started exactly as load and
run would do it. Whatever followed the word reaches the program through
osArgument by the same route as whatever follows run, so "Say hello there"
and "Type notes.txt" work without either program knowing how it was started.

load and run are unchanged and both stay. load is how the monitor puts an
arbitrary file in front of itself, which typing a name deliberately cannot do:
the extension is added rather than assumed, so "notes.txt" looks for
notes.txt.sbx and a text file is unreachable by name whatever is inside it.

Three things this had to get right:

The built-ins are tried first and always win. The search hangs off the end of
the dispatch chain, so a file called dir.sbx cannot become dir, and the
commands worth trusting when the disk is what you are doubting stay
trustworthy. The invoke disk carries a working dir.sbx so that this is checked
rather than asserted.

A file that is found but is broken says so. "not a program" and "I do not
know" are different answers, and giving the second about a file sitting on the
disk would send somebody looking in the wrong place. loadProgram therefore
hands back a status as well as a message, since only "no file of that name"
can fairly be reported as anything other than a fault.

doLoad became that subroutine rather than being copied. It ends in RET instead
of a jump to the prompt, and each way of failing sets its number and its text
together so a new one cannot leave half of the answer behind.

cosmosBreak moves because Break prints the pointers it was handed and those
are the shell's leftovers, which a CALL now puts back.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 17:25:50 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 dbe58db660 Add Type and More, and the file stream they are built on
Two applications that read a file too big for Data Memory: Type prints one,
More pages it. Both sit on fileStream.asm, which wraps osFileInfo and
osFileBlock into open-and-next so an application walks a file's blocks without
repeating the service calls.

The disk fixture is deliberately awkward: readable.txt crosses several blocks
and carries no zero byte to be mistaken for an end marker, and empty.txt says
that zero blocks is a valid file rather than an error.

These three files were written by ChatGPT, as their headers record.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-24 17:15:53 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3f95056eec Three papercuts a visitor would hit first
Found by a review, all three confirmed by trying them rather than by
reading.

1. THE STRICT BUILD CLAIM WAS FALSE. The README says the sources build clean
   under -std=c11 -pedantic with -Wall -Wextra, and they did not: realpath is
   an XSI interface, and _POSIX_C_SOURCE=200809L does not reach it, so the
   assembler would not compile. The ordinary -Os build never saw it, because
   without -std=c11 the compiler's own default declares realpath anyway.

   _XOPEN_SOURCE=700 is POSIX.1-2008 plus XSI, and covers every file on its
   own. Narrowed by compiling each source with each candidate macro rather
   than by adding one and hoping.

   And 'make strict' now checks it, as part of 'make test'. The README makes
   a claim somebody may check by typing it, so the suite types it. Verified
   the check bites by putting the old macro back.

2. THE COSMOS README HAD NOT CAUGHT UP WITH THIS WEEK. It said there were no
   breakpoints and proposed writing a spare byte over an instruction - two
   commits after SWI osBreak was built, which does it without overwriting
   anything and is described correctly further down the same file. Its
   Current Scope said there was no native assembler and that self-hosting
   was the intended long-term milestone. And the streaming section spoke of
   a machine "one day going to assemble itself".

   All three now say what is true. Self-hosting is described as done, with
   what is left of it named: a linker, and an editor that knows what
   assembly is.

3. 'make run-hello' DID NOT WORK, and it is the one command the makefile's
   own header advertises. It was a pattern rule against $(BUILD)/%.bin,
   which worked while every program sat at the top of Programs/ and broke
   the moment they were filed into Examples/ - which I did, four commits ago,
   without trying it.

   The name is looked up among the programs now, so it is the program's name
   rather than its path, and an unknown one lists what there is instead of
   saying "No rule to make target".

The same sweep was run across all four documents for other claims this week
invalidated. The remaining "not yet" phrases are about faults that genuinely
are not defined yet.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-21 16:17:24 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 7e8639489b Take the direction out of the last cross references
Includes two edits of Anachronaut's: dropping a "See the Assembler Manual"
from text that is now IN the Assembler Manual, and tightening a sentence
about when a vector number has to be agreed.

The first of those was mine to have caught. Moving "Loading A Program From
A Disk" into that manual turned a cross reference into a document telling
you to go and read itself. I checked for dangling references before the
move and found none, because I checked for references by SECTION NAME and
not for references to the manuals themselves.

Checked properly now, both directions: no other document refers to itself,
and nothing that moved says "above" or "below" about something that ended up
in a different file.

The three remaining directional references are gone with them - two that
were correct today and one, "See Numbers You Write Down below", pointing at
a section twenty four lines further down that nothing guaranteed would stay
there. A reference that carries a direction is a reference that goes wrong
the next time anything moves, and this week moved a great deal.

There are none left anywhere in the repository.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-21 15:37:08 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 fa3982dbd9 Move the CosmOS third of the Programming Manual to CosmOS
386 of the manual's 1,116 lines documented an operating system rather than
a machine. The split inside that file was never tutorial against reference;
it was the machine against the software that happens to run on it.

  What A Program May Ask The System For   129  -> CosmOS README
  Programs That Come With The System       111  -> CosmOS README
  Reading And Writing The Filesystem        64  -> CosmOS README
  Loading A Program From A Disk             52  -> Assembler Manual
  The Console Library                       25  -> CosmOS README

The services are the clearest case: a hundred and thirty lines describing
what CosmOS offers a program, in the manual for a CPU that has no operating
system of its own. A different system on the same machine would offer
different services and that section would be wrong for it.

The loadable program format goes to the Assembler Manual instead, because
SBEX is a thing the assembler WRITES. Nothing in the CPU knows what it is.

The Programming Manual is 716 lines and fourteen sections now, all of them
about the machine.

TWO DUPLICATE DESCRIPTIONS COLLAPSED INTO ONE EACH. The application list
existed in both documents in different words, and the CosmOS copy had gone
stale - no Break, no Stream, no assembler - because only the manual's copy
was checked. Moving the checked one in and deleting the other leaves one
list, and docs.sh follows it.

The second was made by this commit and caught while reading the seams: the
CosmOS README already had a service table, so the move briefly produced two.
That section now says what services are for and points at the one table.

Renaming a section as it moved: "Reading And Writing The Filesystem" is
"The Filesystem Library", which says what it is and reads beside "The
Console Library".

docs.sh follows all five, and each was verified by renaming the heading in
its new home and reading the complaint. The README and the CosmOS README
both described what the other manuals cover, and both were wrong the moment
this landed; they say the division out loud now, since it is the point.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-21 14:35:18 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 dcb331c151 SplitBit assembles SplitBit: M1, a single file with no includes
Programs/CosmOS/Assembler/ is an assembler written in SplitBit assembly. It
runs under CosmOS, reads source off a SplitBit disk, and writes a binary back
to it with no host involved anywhere:

    > run Asm.sbx hello.asm
    wrote hello.bin: program 17, data 14, labels 2

THE ACCEPTANCE TEST IS THE BYTES. Tests/native.sh assembles Programs/hello.asm
both ways and compares the two files byte for byte, then runs the one the
machine built. "It ran" and "the sizes look right" both pass for a binary with
a label one byte out, which is a program that jumps into the middle of an
instruction - so the only honest test is the one SplitDisk and sbfs.asm
already work under: two implementations of one written specification, each
checking the other. The files are identical and the result prints Hello,
World! in 70 cycles.

hello.asm is the target because it is the oldest program in the repository.
The first thing this machine ever ran is now the first thing it assembles for
itself.

TWO PASSES OVER STREAMED SOURCE. The C assembler reads every token of every
file into one array; that cannot port, because cosmos.asm alone is 56,047
bytes against 64K of Data Memory. The native one streams through a 256 byte
window, twice, and keeps only the label table between the passes. Two passes
suffice because every length is known without resolving anything - an
instruction's from its shape, a value's is one, a string's is its characters
and a zero - so the first pass fixes every address and the second never needs
a fixup list. A forward reference stops being a special case and becomes the
reason there are two passes at all.

The parts, each checked before anything was built on it:
  source.asm    characters out of a file of any size, with a line number
  token.asm     tokens out of characters, one character of lookahead
  classify.asm  what a token is, in the C assembler's order, which IS the
                language: keyword, instruction, value, string, label
  labels.asm    names packed in an arena, four bytes of index each
  numbers.asm   sixteen bit arithmetic, since sbfs.asm's cannot be reached
  table.asm     the instruction set, generated by the same script the
                monitor's copy is, and now BOTH are checked by docs.sh

readTest.asm and tokenTest.asm check the reader and the tokenizer on their
own, recorded as cosmosSource and cosmosTokens. A wrong classification does
not produce a wrong byte somewhere obvious; it produces a right looking
program of the wrong length, so it is worth catching where it happens.

WHAT IT REFUSES: #Include, #Base, #Align, #Reserve and #Vectors are refused
by name rather than ignored. Skipping a directive would produce a file that
looked right and was the wrong length, which is the worst thing an assembler
can do.

Two traps worth recording, both already known to this project and both hit
again: CALL restores A, B and DP0-DP2, so three routines returning an answer
in A had it undone by their own return; and numStep works on DP0, so three
sites that set DP1 left a pointer that never advanced.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-20 22:13:15 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3d2ab34229 Streaming: read a file bigger than the machine's memory
osFileRead hands over a whole file, which settles anything under 64K and
settles nothing above it. CosmOS's own source is above it - the sources
together are 104K against 64K of Data Memory - so a machine that is going
to assemble itself needs another way to ask.

osFileInfo (0d26) says how many blocks a file occupies. osFileBlock (0d27)
hands over one of them and says how many of its bytes belong to the file.
Between them a program reads a file of any size through a buffer of 256.

Blocks rather than bytes from osFileInfo is forced, not chosen: a file on a
sixteen megabyte disk is up to twenty four bits long and a pointer holds
sixteen. osFileBlock's count answers in DP3 for the same kind of reason -
a whole block is 256 bytes, which does not fit in a register, and a count
that reported it as zero would make every reader special-case the end.

Nothing is kept open. Every call names the file, so there is no handle to
leak and nothing left behind by a program that stops halfway. Taken at its
word that means searching the directory once per block, so the system
remembers where the last file it was asked about lives; every path that can
change what a name means calls fileForget, including the shell's own delete
and rename, which do not go through the services. Correctness never depends
on the cache - a cache thrown away is indistinguishable from one never
filled. Measured on a 329 block file: 7% of the run saved when the file is
the first directory entry, 11% when it is the sixteenth.

These two say WHY when the answer is no, which the others do not. Elsewhere
the only useful response to a failure is to give up, so one value suffices.
These are asked questions, and running off the end is how a reader learns it
has finished, so it gets an answer of its own: 1 no disk, 2 no such file,
3 past the end, 4 the disk refused.

Apps/Stream.asm reads an 84,000 byte file through 256 bytes. The check that
matters is the second one: a small file read BOTH ways - whole with
osFileRead and streamed - with the two checksums compared, so streaming is
measured against the path already known to work rather than against a number
someone wrote down. The checksum is Fletcher's rather than a sum, because a
sum is the same whatever order the bytes arrived in and the order is exactly
what streaming has to get right. Both checksums were also confirmed against
the same arithmetic run on the host.

The rest of the test is the cache: two files read alternately catch a memory
that missed the name changing, and a rename catches one that missed the file
moving - and that one would otherwise pass, since the blocks are still there
holding the same bytes.

The test file is generated rather than taken from the repository. The CosmOS
sources would be a truer picture and would move the recorded checksum every
time a line of CosmOS was edited, putting a real difference in a crowd of
meaningless ones - the same trap the cycle counts used to set.

cosmosBreak's recorded output moves by two bytes in two pointers: SbfsIndex
added two bytes to the filesystem's data and Break prints the system
addresses the registers happened to hold.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-08-20 21:19:36 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 3b800a69e8 Monitor: a line assembler
a <address>, then instructions until a line that is just a dot.

The syntax is the assembler's own: a selector rides on the mnemonic as LDA.0
or LDD.0.1, and leaving one off means Data Pointer 0 exactly as it does in a
source file, so nothing learned at the monitor has to be unlearned when
writing a program. Case is folded, since the assembler does not care either.

Numbers are hexadecimal and bare. A source file writes 0x2000 or 0d16 because
it has both and must say which; a monitor has one and says so once, in the
manual, rather than on every line.

It reads the same table the disassembler does, searched the other way round,
which is the point of it being a table rather than two lists: what a writes,
d reads back, and neither can drift from the other or from the assembler both
were generated from. Instruction lengths come from the shared shape table
too, so the cursor cannot get out of step with what was written.

THE WHOLE LINE IS UNDERSTOOD BEFORE ANYTHING IS WRITTEN. Emitting the opcode
first and discovering a missing operand afterwards leaves half an instruction
in memory, which the next line usually covers up and the last line of a
session does not. Written that way first and fixed.

What cannot be written is a label, and that is the whole difference between
this and the assembler proper: a label is a promise to fill an address in
later, and later is what a line at a time does not have.

The recorded test now types in a complete program - a string poked into Data
Memory, instructions assembled into Program Memory, and the result run - and
includes a lower case mnemonic, both selector forms, an instruction that does
not exist and one missing its value, so the refusals sit beside the successes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 22:29:50 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 b36d438132 Add the CosmOS README, brought up to date with today's changes
Written by Anachronaut and not previously committed. Three things in it had
gone stale between writing and now, and are corrected here rather than
committed knowingly wrong:

  - the shell command table still described dump, which the monitor
    supersedes, so it now describes monitor mode and its commands
  - the service table listed four services, and there are nine
  - the application list did not mention Files

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-19 18:20:20 -04:00