Devlog 30 Cleanup

January 02, 2023

1. Log 30
2. Cleanup
3. Closing thoughts

Log 30

I can’t seem to find my way through fiveforths.s anymore. The file has grown to over 700 lines and even with a good text editor I have trouble finding stuff. In this session I’ll split things into various files to simplify my life.

Cleanup

Since GNU Assembler has very primitive include functionality, I’ll make sure to move the source files to the src/ sub-directory, and each file will be prefixed with a number, to clearly indicate the correct loading order.

The first change is to include src in the search path for the assembler, so we’ll modify the Makefile like this:

-               $(AS) $(CFLAGS) -march=$(ARCH) -o $@ $<
+               $(AS) $(CFLAGS) -march=$(ARCH) -I src -o $@ $<

Next, I modified fiveforths.s by including each file in numerical order:

.include "01-variables-constants.s"
.include "02-macros.s"
.include "03-interrupts.s"

# include board-specific functions
.include "gd32vf103.s"

.include "04-io-helpers.s"
.include "05-internal-functions.s"
.include "06-initialization.s"
.include "07-error-handling.s"
.include "08-forth-primitives.s"
.include "09-interpreter.s"

Finally, I simply moved the pieces of code into separate files. It seems like quite a big change, but the functionality remains exactly the same. Just type make and it will rebuild everything as usual.

Closing thoughts

This change was purely aesthetic but I think it was really necessary to preserve my sanity. I’ll get back to fixing the execute issue in the next session.