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Author SHA1 Message Date
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 a8707f29f0 Names for things
"set apps /Apps", and then "$apps" anywhere on a later line stands for it. A
name stops where a name stops - letters and digits - so it composes into a path
without anything having to be quoted, which is the whole reason a script would
want one.

THE SUBSTITUTION HAPPENS ON EVERY LINE THE SHELL IS ABOUT TO RUN, typed or read
out of a file, so the two behave the same and no command below has to know that
variables exist. Same shape as the line editing: one place the whole system
already flows through, rather than a decision made twenty times.

A NAME NOTHING WAS SET TO DOES NOT RUN THE LINE. Every other shell expands it to
nothing, and that is the wrong answer here: a mistyped name would quietly become
an empty path, which is the class of silent wrong answer the rest of this system
spends its effort refusing. It says so and the line counts as failed, which
stops a script - and the test proves that by running one, where the line after
it must not appear. Somebody who wants an empty value writes "set name" and gets
one, so the escape hatch exists and has to be asked for.

A NAME TOO LONG IS AN ERROR RATHER THAN A SHORTER NAME. Cutting it off at
fifteen characters was the first version, and it is the same fault wearing a
different coat: two names differing only after the fifteenth would be one
variable, and the complaint about a missing one printed a word nobody typed.

Eight slots of sixty four bytes - sixteen of name, forty eight of value - and
sixty four rather than eighty because A and B are a sixteen bit shift register,
so two rotations turn a slot number into its offset. The same trick the history
uses, and the reason neither needs a multiply this machine has not got.

TWO THINGS I GOT WRONG AND ONE I FOUND:

doSetVar ended in RET. It is BRANCHED to from the dispatch, not called, so that
RET went wherever the Stack happened to point - the same fault that formatted a
disk last week, in a command written three days after the rule was named. The
new lint rule does not catch this shape: it fires on falling INTO a subroutine,
not on a branch target that ends like one.

And a test of the expansion's answer, which is dead code: commandFailed does not
return. It marks the line and branches to the prompt, the way every failure in
this shell is reported, so the only way out of the expansion is the one where it
worked.

Which turned up a real leak, measured and not yet fixed: every failure that goes
through commandFailed abandons the frames between the prompt and the call. SP
goes from FFFD to FE6D over twenty of them, twenty bytes each. Its own commit.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 19:23:55 -04:00
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5 fd9c4c75f8 Tell the person where it hurts
A fault stopped the machine and printed a line to standard error. On a terminal
that is a diagnosis. Behind a window it is a frozen picture and no reason at
all, because the message went somewhere nobody was looking - the machine looked
hung and was not. It had stopped, and said so invisibly.

CosmOS catches all five faults now and says what happened on the screen, with
the address, in red.

A FAULT ENDS THE PROGRAM, NOT THE MACHINE. That is the answer to "carry on or
start again", and it is not a compromise: a bare RETI from most of these meets
the instruction that failed and fails again, so carrying on was never on offer.
But the machine is almost never what is broken. Everything the shell puts back
when a program exits - the Stack, its vectors, the drive, the working directory,
the console, the screen - is exactly what wants putting back after one dies, so
the handler sets a status and joins handleExit. You are back at the prompt, and
the program is recorded as having STOPPED rather than finished, because saying
"finished" under a red fault message would be the shell contradicting itself.

A fault below where programs load is the system's own, and there is nothing to
go back to. That one says so and stops.

THE SCREEN GOES BACK TO A MODE TEXT CAN BE SEEN IN, and that is the part that
matters rather than the part that is prettiest. A program that faulted in bitmap
mode left the console with no text rows, so it draws nothing at all: the message
would be perfectly correct and completely invisible, which is the one thing it
must never be. Two palette entries go back for the same reason, since a program
that wrote its own colours can leave every ink the same as every paper. Only the
two the message needs, so the rest of what the program chose is left alone.

Both halves are checked by looking at the PICTURE, because the serial line was
never where the problem was. Crash blind ruins the palette and drops into bitmap
mode before it faults; without the mode the screen comes back 320 by 200 with
nothing on it, and without the palette it is the right size with the message
present and unreadable. Each break loses the red on its own.

Crash is also a program worth having: it breaks in whichever of the five ways
you name, so a fault screen can be looked at without having written a bug first.

Two things found on the way:

The native assembler keeps its OWN copy of the reserved vector names, so it did
not know NoHandler or NoDevice and built a cosmos.bin that differed from the
host assembler's. Caught by native.sh, which is exactly the drift that test
exists for.

And cosmosMonitor had dead input. It assembles code into 0x8000 and runs it, and
that code faults - which used to kill the machine, so everything after it in the
file had never run. It runs now, and the recording grew by sixty lines of
monitor session that had been unreachable since the day the fault was put there.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
2026-09-01 15:08:20 -04:00