20150809 - 1536-4 : Coloring

Night 4 on 1536. Brought up most of the "x56-40" (x86-64 in hex) assembler now. Also have majority of the forth-like words needed to assemble self-documenting constants {add,mul,neg,not,and,or,xor,...}.

(Lost Image When Minus Went Down)

Started on the editor. Just enough of a quick prototype to render the text view in the editor (sans cursor for now). All screens on this post are captured from the editor running in an x86-64 emulator. Keeping the fixed 64 character lines makes everything very simple. Syntax highlighting was carefully designed to only need one line of context. Just a simple backward sweep to color, then a forward sweep to correct the color for comments (the \ marks rest of line as comment). Adjusted the font, {_,-,=} all now extend out full font cell width so they can double as lines. Adjusted the colors closer to what I like for syntax highlighting. Still experimenting with how to comment and arrange source.


Have 16 characters to the right of the source window to use for real-time debug data. Like viewing values of registers, memory, etc. Thinking through details in the background. Next step is to bring up the non-USB throw-away keyboard driver, then get the editor functional.

Bugs
Still finding the no-errors, no-tools, know-everything path, easy to work with. This time lost some time to an opcode assembly bug. A full class of opcodes was broken, something never validated from last time, just forgot to make a RIP relative offset RIP relative for non-branch instructions. Everything else working out of the box with no human errors. When the mind can reason about the entire system, and the edit/execute loop is near instant, bugs normally are instant fix. Quite satisfying to work this way.