Devlog 33 Storing Numbers
January 05, 2023
Log 33
I know I promised I would get to compile words, but that’s hard so instead in this session i’ll add the ability to store numbers on the stack. Once that works then I’ll get to compiling words hahaha.
Storing numbers
The number routine has already been written in src/05-internal-functions.s, but we had no code to call it. Unlike most Forths, I don’t want to check if it’s a number after checking if it’s a known word. That concept seems strange to me. For starters, we already know what a number will look like. Since we’re only dealing with base 10 numbers for the moment, we can define a number as “a series of digits optionally prefixed by a minus sign”.
In that case, I’d rather we scan for a number before calling djb2_hash.
One oversight is the registers need to be saved before calling number, because it clobbers the a0 and a1 registers. I could fix this but I’ll save that for the optimization step. For now, let’s just save/restore them:
# check if the token is a number
mv t5, a0 # save a0 temporarily
mv t6, a1 # save a1 temporarily
call number # try to convert the token to an integer
bnez a1, push_number # push the token to the stack if it's a number
mv a0, t5 # restore a0
mv a1, t6 # restore a1
Here we’re saving the W and X working registers to temporary registers, and then calling number, which will return the result of the operation in X. If the result is not 0 (ex: 1), then we have a valid number so we’ll call push_number to store the number (stored in W) on the stack:
push_number:
PUSH a0 # push the W working register to the top of the data stack
j process_token # jump back to process the next token
This then jumps right back to processing the next token, completely skipping the hash/lookup/compile/execute steps. Let’s try adding numbers and a variable to the stack in the terminal:
-2147483648 -2147483649 state 4294967296 -100 100 12345 -31234567<Enter>
A few notes: -2147483649 should translate to 2147483647 as mentioned in devlog 26. The state variable will be its address, which is 0x20004cfc (or decimal 536890620), and 4294967296 should translate to 0. Let’s check in GDB, starting at the top of the stack and going down by 32 bytes (4 bytes x 8 values):
(gdb) x/8dw 0x20005000-32
0x20004fe0: -31234567 12345 100 -100
0x20004ff0: 0 536890620 2147483647 -2147483648
Great! That works just as expected. Now we can store numbers on the stack, and non-numbers will be hashed and searched for in the dictionary.
Closing thoughts
Well that was easier than expected, let’s just hope I didn’t make a fatal mistake.. but so far it seems to work fine. In the next session I have no other choice but to jump to the compile mode and try to get that working. It might require a review of COLON and SEMI… we’ll see.