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
A typed word had ".sbx" pasted on the end of it before anything went
looking, which is why "notes.txt" sent the shell after a notes.txt.sbx
that was never going to exist, and why a script could only be started
with "do". The extension was what made a file reachable by name.
Now the word as typed is asked for first and the word with the extension
on it only after that misses. What comes back is dispatched on what is
inside it: SBEX loads and starts, "#!" is read as lines. The loader
already refuses anything that is not SBEX and the script reader already
refuses anything without the shebang, so the two kinds of runnable file
turn each other away and neither has to know the other exists.
The suffix can only ever be a second guess, so a file that is really
there always beats one that would have to be invented and every program
already on a disk still starts by the short name people type for it. It
costs a second walk of each directory when a word is not found in it.
Tab completion offers a file under the name it actually has, and the
suffix stripper is gone: a first word can now be any file at all, and
offering only the ones ending .sbx would hide the scripts.
The video capture windows moved out a hundred thousand cycles, because
starting Lander now walks four names where it walked two.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
Tab completion leaves a space after the word it finished, which is right
when another word is coming. When nothing else was coming, that space
stayed on the end of the line and a command taking a file name looked
for one whose name ended in a space:
load greet.sbx loaded, starting at 5000
load greet.sbx no such file (the same line, finished with Tab)
Which took most of the good out of completion, since finishing a name
and pressing Return is the whole of what it is for. The existing tab
tests all typed more characters after completing, so none of them ever
submitted a completed line.
lineTrim already took the leading spaces off for indented blocks, so the
trailing ones come off in the same place, on the whole line, rather than
at each of the dozen commands that take a name. Walking back needs no
guard against running off the front: by then the first character cannot
be a space, and a line that was nothing but spaces has already become an
empty one.
CONSEQUENCE WORTH SEEING: echo no longer prints a trailing space it was
given, which is why cosmosTabPath's recording moved. That is the
conventional behaviour and it means what echo is handed is what somebody
would have typed, but it is a real change and not only a bug fix.
cosmosTrim covers a line completed and run straight away, the same
trailing space typed by hand, spaces at both ends at once, and a line of
nothing but spaces, which still has to do nothing rather than fail.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
Paths and programs, which is the half that makes it worth having. The first word
of a line is a command or a PROGRAM, offered under the name somebody would type
- the extension taken off - and anything after it is a file, offered as it
really is. A separator anywhere in the word says which directory to look in.
A directory answers with a separator on the end instead of a space, which says
what it is and lets the next part be typed straight away. The answer ending in
one is also what stops a space being added, so that is one test rather than a
flag.
PROGRAMS ARE LOOKED FOR WHERE THE SHELL WOULD LOOK to run one: where you are,
/Apps on the disk you are on, and /Apps on drive 0. Offering something the shell
would not find would be finishing a word into a thing that then does not work.
Drive 0's is skipped when that is already the drive, or every program in it
would be offered twice and nothing would ever be the only match.
Walking somebody else's directory means standing in it, which is the only way to
walk one here, so where the person was and which drive they were on are put down
first and restored whatever happens.
Three bugs, all found by running it:
THE DIRECTORY TEST WAS INVERTED. dir asks the same question the same way round
four hundred lines further up, which is what made it obvious once looked at.
THE /Apps WALK OVERWROTE THE TYPED PATH. The whole search runs a second time to
list the matches, and by then TabDir said "/Apps" - so a word that had named
nowhere went looking in the wrong place and listed nothing at all. Two ways into
the walk now, and the typed path is never written over.
AND LISTING ONLY KNEW ABOUT COMMANDS, because it was a second copy of the walk.
It is the same walk with a flag now: finding the answer and showing the matches
are the same question asked twice.
Also cosmosMonitor, which had been RE-BLESSED INTO MEANINGLESSNESS by the wall
move. It disassembles a loaded program, at an address the input names - and that
address moved a page while the recording was simply re-recorded to whatever came
out, which was a page of zeroes. It is pointed at 5000 again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5