Devlog 31 Interpreting Words
January 04, 2023
Log 31
In this session I’m going to review the token function from src/05-internal-functions.s before reviewing the interpreter in file src/09-interpreter.s.
Reviewing token
In my token function, I read characters backward from TOIN to the start of the word. This makes no sense because it’ll then be impossible to read the next word. I’ll need to make some adjustments for the TOIN variable location, but let’s start by fixing token.
First, since we’re not comparing TOIN with the TIB address anymore, we can remove that guard:
- blt a1, a0, token_done # compare the address of TOIN with the address of TIB
Next, we want to increment TOIN by 1 for each character found, instead of decrementing:
- addi a1, a1, -1 # move TOIN pointer down
+ addi a0, a0, 1 # move buffer pointer up
+ beqz t0, token_zero # compare char with 0
I moved the buffer address to W instead of X. Here I also added a new branch address called token_zero. The TIB will always be filled with zeroes first, so we want to keep scanning the TIB until we find a zero. That’s a character which can’t be input via the UART/serial terminal, and doesn’t belong in the terminal input buffer (except when we initialize it).
Next, when we find a space character, we want to ignore it because we know we’re done scanning our token:
+ addi a0, a0, -1 # move buffer pointer down to ignore the space character
+ sub a0, a0, t2 # store the start address in W
+ j token_done
We’ll use that opportunity to store the new TOIN address in the W (a0) working register.
Our token_zero label looks like this:
+token_zero:
+ addi a0, a0, -1 # move buffer pointer down to ignore the 0
It does this because we also want to ignore the zero if we find it (by moving TOIN back by 1). This will automatically fall into token_done afterwards, whose only job is to store the size of the token in the X (a1) working register, and then return from the function:
token_done:
mv a1, t2 # store the size in X
ret
That’s all for adjusting the token function. Now we can jump back to the interpreter and fix that.
Interpreting words
The first change I want to make is ensure our .loop function jumps to process_token instead of ok. We obviously don’t want to print ok after scanning only one word in the buffer:
-.loop: .word ok # indirect jump to interpreter after executing a word
+.loop: .word process_token # indirect jump to interpreter after executing a word
Next, in our interpreter_tib function, we don’t actually want to start processing the token just yet, first we need to replace the newline with a space, so let’s jump to a different label:
- beq a0, t0, process_token # process the token if it matches
+ beq a0, t0, replace_newline # process the token if it matches
Then, where we convert the newline to a space, we’ll change the label name as well:
-process_token:
+replace_newline:
Now things start to make a bit more sense, let’s re-add the process_token label a bit lower, where we actually “process” the “token” right before calling the token function. This is where we’ll loop to after executing a word:
+process_token:
# process the token
- mv a0, t2 # load the TIB address in the W working register
+ li t3, TOIN # load TOIN variable into unused temporary register
+ lw a0, 0(t3) # load TOIN address value into temporary
call token # read the token
We made a few changes here, the first was removing the naive approach of just copying the TIB address into W.
This can probably be optimized by renaming some registers, but for now we want to reload TOIN into a temporary, and then load the TOIN address into W, before calling token. This ensures it’ll get the correct buffer address to start with.
Once the call returns, we won’t need to reload TOIN because we’ll already have it in W (a0), as well as the token’s size in X (a1). We can just add them together to get the new TOIN address:
- lw t0, 0(t3) # load TOIN address value into temporary
- add t0, t0, a1 # add the size of the token to TOIN
+ add t0, a0, a1 # add the size of the token to TOIN
sw t0, 0(t3) # move TOIN to process the next word in the TIB
# bounds checks on token size
beqz a1, ok # ok if token size is 0
This seems to work well. In the event where our token size is 0, because the last character was a space or a 0, then we’re done processing tokens and the bounds check will jump to ok, which re-initializes the TIB before looping back to the interpreter. Note the stack is not reset, so our sp stack pointer will remain and the words we entered in the terminal will have executed and their results will be stored in (or removed from) the stack (assuming they actually modify the stack).
Example:
(gdb) i r sp
sp 0x20004ffc 0x20004ffc
(gdb) x/xw 0x20004ffc
0x20004ffc: 0x00000000
(gdb) c
Continuing.
Breakpoint 1, interpreter_start () at src/09-interpreter.s:11
Now in the terminal I type latest<Enter:
latest ok
And back in GDB:
(gdb) i r sp
sp 0x20004ff8 0x20004ff8
(gdb) x/xw 0x20004ff8
0x20004ff8: 0x080004f8
(gdb) x/xw 0x080004f8
0x80004f8 <word_SEMI>: 0x080004ec
Perfect! There’s the address of the latest word we defined: SEMI.
Closing thoughts
I’m happy I can now execute multiple words from the terminal. The next step is to try and compile words. I’ll also need to ensure we call number so we can store numbers in the stack. I’ll try to focus on those two things in the next session, and see if I can find any bugs in the current implementation. Almost done!