I got bitten again, I've over-designed my solution. The last time
it happened, it was that memory mapping thing I was wanting to add.
The indirect memory access feature I was adding was to solve a
specific problem: Allow Collapse OS to cross-compile directly on a
AT28 EEPROM.
It began well. As long as we were staying in the assembler realm,
things were looking good. However, when we got into the xcomp realm
(B260), things became ugly, and I had to creep up indirection where
I didn't want to.
All of this because I wanted to solve my initial problem in a
slightly more generalized way. The broad idea was that these indirect
memory access could allow xcomp into a broad kind of memory-like
devices.
This idea broke on the "@" part of the equation. If I want
indirections to be two-way and allow xcomp to work properly, I have
to add this indirection to FIND (and possibly others) and this just
isn't practical or elegant.
So, I'm taking a step back and accepting that the solution I design
for now is exclusively for the AT28. What I'm thinking is to add a
low-level hook for memory writing, at the assembly level.
Also, rename "Addressed devices" to "Indirect memory access".
I do this because I need to add indirect versions of !, @ and ,
to allow boostrapping directly to EEPROM and that A,, thing I've
added to assemblers felt like really bad names.
With this change, I'd like to generalize the use of the * suffix
for aliases.
This would be useful, for example, to allow the assembler to write
straight to an AT28 EEPROM without going to RAM. This would be a
life saver in machines with tight RAM such as the SMS.
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...
Virgil Dupras