The dispatch is a run of "is the line this name" comparisons. That is fine to
execute and impossible to WALK, and completing a half typed command needs to
walk them - so the names have to be data as well as code.
They nearly were already: DirName through ExitName were fourteen zero
terminated strings sitting back to back, which is a table by accident of layout.
This makes it deliberate. MonitorName joins them, the run is labelled, and a
count goes underneath because a run of strings does not say where it stops.
WHAT MAKES IT A TABLE IS THE ZEROES. Each name ends in one, so the next begins
after it: no pointers, no lengths, and adding a command costs a line.
Tests/docs.sh reads both the dispatch and the run and compares them, because the
two can disagree and every way they do is quiet. A command added to the dispatch
and not to the run simply never completes, which nobody would think to check by
hand. Something put BETWEEN the strings is worse: the walk ends there and takes
every command after it, and the machine goes on working perfectly except that
Tab knows about six things instead of fifteen.
All three break that way and say something useful. Putting one byte in the
middle of the run reports that it holds ten names against the fifteen claimed,
which points at roughly where.
Groundwork for Tab completion. Nothing uses it yet.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01E2JrLzFvuFX9fgi1LDRjrW
AnachronautandClaude Opus 5
749fef8ce2