The ":" now takes care of scanning for ";". Conceptually, having
";" as an immediate word is slightly simpler than the approach in
this commit, but when bootstrapping is involved, this simpler
approach gets murkier.
Moreover, it got even murkier-er when trying to de-stabilize EXIT,
so here we are.
This duplicated feature existed because of bootstrapping issues
with LIT", but again, with careful threading, we can clean things
up.
We can now have a proper "Collapse OS" prompt :)
When writing the xcomp documentation, I realized that with careful
threading and by accepting a bit of code duplication in the xcomp
toolset, I could de-stabilize a couple of words.
(n) and EXIT are a bit trickier, but I think it can be done. It
would be nice to get rid of stable wordrefs...
The 1 byte limitation has been effective for a while now, but I
hadn't made the move yet, I wanted to see if the limitation would
cause me problems. It doesn't.
Doing this now slightly facilitates the IY->BC move in z80.
Bootstrapping: if you try to recreate the CVM binary from the
previous commit with this code, you'll have bootstrapping problems.
The first bootstrap will compile a binary with 2-bytes wide cells
but branching conditionals that yields 1-byte cells. That's bad.
I got around the issue by temporarily inserting a "397 399 LOADR"
instruction in cvm/xcomp.fs, right before the xcomp overrides. This
way, I force 1-byte cells everywhere on the first compiliation,
which then allows me to apply the logic change in cvm/vm.c and have
a properly running binary.
There is now no more actual code in stable ABI, only references.
This makes refactoring of this code much easier. For example,
changing IY to BC as the IP register.
Only its jump at 0x33 remains.
I've also fixed a strange offset oddity in 8086's (n) placement.
It was off by 2, but strangely, it ran properly. Anyway, now it's
fixed.
Previously, it was impossible to cross-compile Collapse OS from a
binary-offsetted Collapse OS because stable ABI wordrefs would have
a wrongly offsetted address.
This solves the problem by replacing those wordrefs by direct,
hardcoded stable ABI offset references.
Instead of having wordref point to core word routines, I made them
into word 4 word types. It liberates space into the stable ABI and
should make porting to other arches easier.
I'm also thinking of combining word type with the namelen field
for precious bytes saving, but not now...
I'm planning on going back to 8-bit branching. 16-bit br cells incur
a non-negligible penalty and, while at first 64 words (128 bytes
forward or backward) seemed a bit limiting, I now don't see why one
would ever construct such a big branch. It would be un-forthy.
Also, I looked at using BC instead of IY to hold IP and the transition
would be a lot easier with 8-bit branching.
In this commit, all I do is add overflow checks in IF. The mechanic
below doesn't change. I'll give myself some time to think it over so
that I avoid yet another back and forth.
Virgil Dupras