A comment used to walk through tokGet and srcNext and be classified,
character by character, on the way to being discarded. Comments are most
of what this assembler reads: 87 per cent of what Say.asm pulls in once
services.asm is counted, 59 per cent of CosmOS. The house style here is
dense commentary, so the assembler is penalised more than most by its own
sources.
The saving is not the classifying, it is the BOOKKEEPING. srcNext loads
and stores the walking pointer through memory for every character and
asks numCompare whether the buffer is used up. srcSkipComment keeps the
pointer in a data pointer for a whole run and the newline in B, so a
comment byte costs a load, a compare and two steps. A run is capped at
255 so one byte can count it, which is the only reason it loops.
Measured, each version with its own rebuilt images:
without with
hello 791,957 586,184
Say 9,924,401 4,506,702 2.20x
Files 13,197,710 7,188,351 1.84x
Keys 23,091,447 15,069,880 1.53x
cosmos 886,498,996 789,982,899 1.12x
Which tracks the comment ratios: Say gains most and cosmos least, in
proportion to how much of each is prose.
---- And two mistakes worth keeping ----
The scratch went among the READER'S STATE, which is a block copied whole
by a count written down somewhere else - so every saved file lost the
last four bytes of itself and an include came back with its pointer
wrong. The comment above that block says not to do this, in capitals.
That is twice this week: scriptCopyState had the same shape this morning.
And a file that ends inside a comment has to put back the file that
included it, exactly as srcAtEnd does for a character. NOTHING IN THIS
REPOSITORY ENDS THAT WAY - every source here ends on a line of code with
a newline after it - so break.sh could not catch an error in that path
because nothing reached it. tail.asm is generated with no newline on its
last line for that reason, and usestail.asm names a label after the
include, which is what goes missing when the include never returns.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5
2e9cb9af7e