Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
|
|
|
# akbasic
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A BASIC interpreter written in C, styled after [Commodore BASIC 7.0](http://www.jbrain.com/pub/cbm/manuals/128/C128PRG.pdf)
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and the [Dartmouth BASIC of 1964](https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basic.html). It runs a
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`.bas` file, it gives you a prompt, and — the point of the exercise — it links into a C program
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as a scripting engine.
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It is a rewrite of [basicinterpreter](https://source.starfort.tech/andrew/basicinterpreter), a Go
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implementation that started from the Java Lox instructions in
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[craftinginterpreters.com](https://craftinginterpreters.com) and then struck off on its own. That
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project is deprecated. It is vendored here as the behavioural spec to read when a question about
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semantics comes up, and its acceptance corpus is checked in at
|
2026-08-04 16:21:59 -04:00
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[`tests/language/`](tests/language/README.md) and runs on every build — so nothing about
|
Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
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building or testing this project needs it.
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## Quickstart
|
Port the README from the Go version and document embedding
Carries the reference README across, adjusted where C changes the answer: cmake
instead of make, the ak* libraries instead of the go-sdl2 bindings, and the
limits table now includes the three ceilings the Go version did not need because
it called make().
The new "Embedding the interpreter" section is the point of the rewrite, so it
states the four rules the library holds to -- nothing terminates the process,
nothing calls malloc, no file-scope mutable state, the host owns the loop -- and
each was checked against the tree rather than asserted.
Adds akbasic_runtime_load(). Writing the section turned up a real gap: a host
usually already holds its script as a string and wants the sink reserved for
output, and the only path that existed was AKBASIC_MODE_RUNSTREAM reading the
program through the sink's readline, which forces a game to point its output
device at its source text. The alternative was reaching into the header's
"internal API" block for store_line. Neither is something to put in a README.
Adds examples/embed.c, which is the code the README quotes -- a custom sink, a
bounded per-frame run, and the PASS-not-CATCH rule for a loop inside an ATTEMPT.
It is built by every build and registered as a CTest case, so a signature change
breaks the build instead of rotting the document. The README's own snippet is
compiled separately as a check; both were run before committing.
The "What Isn't Implemented / Isn't Working" section leads with the eleven
inherited defects rather than burying them, because five of them were found by
this port and a reader deserves to know that 1 - 2 - 3 computes 1 - 2 before
they hit it. Corrected two claims while verifying: the runtime is 10.1MB rather
than the ~8MB first written, and its largest single cost is the environment pool
at 4.1MB, not the source table.
ctest 60/60; ASan+UBSan 60/60; no warnings under -Wall -Wextra.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 06:42:08 -04:00
|
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|
Execute every documented example as a test
docs/ and README.md carry 85 fenced blocks. Every one was checked by hand
exactly once, when it was written, which is not a standard that survives a
changing interpreter -- and four were already wrong: two transcripts showing a
leading space PRINT does not emit, akbasic_TextSink in README.md missing the
two members it had grown hours earlier, and FILTER's refusal quoted with
wording the code does not use.
tests/docs_examples.sh reads a fence-tag vocabulary and runs what it finds.
BASIC programs and transcripts run and are byte-compared against an `output`
block; C snippets compile with -fsyntax-only against the real include path,
which CMake writes out because it is transitive through akerror, akstdlib and
akgl; shell blocks run in a sandbox. Anything that would reconfigure the build
tree, hit the network or re-enter the suite is tagged norun with the reason in
MAINTENANCE.md, and the two cmake blocks stay hand-maintained by decision.
An untagged block is a failure rather than a default, and the pass line
reports what it executed by kind. Both exist because the way a harness like
this dies is by quietly matching nothing and passing -- which it duly did on
the first CTest run, where a generator expression evaluating to nothing still
contributed an empty argument that the script read as a filename. The count is
what caught it.
The excerpt check earns its own mention: a block tagged
`c excerpt=include/akbasic/sink.h` must still appear in that header, comments
and whitespace ignored. Compiling it would only redefine the type, so a
compile check could not have found the stale struct, and did not.
Registered as the CTest case docs_examples in both configurations. Fixing the
four wrong examples turned up two interpreter defects, fixed in the previous
commit and recorded in TODO.md section 8.
MAINTENANCE.md is new: the fence-tag reference, what to do when the case
fails, and the conventions that until now only existed inside source comments
-- the three test lists and how two of them invert "passed", the sorted verb
table, that a golden file is never edited to suit this interpreter, and that a
fix gets mutation-checked with a file copy rather than git checkout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:41:36 -04:00
|
|
|
```sh norun
|
Port the README from the Go version and document embedding
Carries the reference README across, adjusted where C changes the answer: cmake
instead of make, the ak* libraries instead of the go-sdl2 bindings, and the
limits table now includes the three ceilings the Go version did not need because
it called make().
The new "Embedding the interpreter" section is the point of the rewrite, so it
states the four rules the library holds to -- nothing terminates the process,
nothing calls malloc, no file-scope mutable state, the host owns the loop -- and
each was checked against the tree rather than asserted.
Adds akbasic_runtime_load(). Writing the section turned up a real gap: a host
usually already holds its script as a string and wants the sink reserved for
output, and the only path that existed was AKBASIC_MODE_RUNSTREAM reading the
program through the sink's readline, which forces a game to point its output
device at its source text. The alternative was reaching into the header's
"internal API" block for store_line. Neither is something to put in a README.
Adds examples/embed.c, which is the code the README quotes -- a custom sink, a
bounded per-frame run, and the PASS-not-CATCH rule for a loop inside an ATTEMPT.
It is built by every build and registered as a CTest case, so a signature change
breaks the build instead of rotting the document. The README's own snippet is
compiled separately as a check; both were run before committing.
The "What Isn't Implemented / Isn't Working" section leads with the eleven
inherited defects rather than burying them, because five of them were found by
this port and a reader deserves to know that 1 - 2 - 3 computes 1 - 2 before
they hit it. Corrected two claims while verifying: the runtime is 10.1MB rather
than the ~8MB first written, and its largest single cost is the environment pool
at 4.1MB, not the source table.
ctest 60/60; ASan+UBSan 60/60; no warnings under -Wall -Wextra.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 06:42:08 -04:00
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git submodule update --init --recursive
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cmake -S . -B build
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cmake --build build --parallel
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|
ctest --test-dir build --output-on-failure
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|
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
|
|
Execute every documented example as a test
docs/ and README.md carry 85 fenced blocks. Every one was checked by hand
exactly once, when it was written, which is not a standard that survives a
changing interpreter -- and four were already wrong: two transcripts showing a
leading space PRINT does not emit, akbasic_TextSink in README.md missing the
two members it had grown hours earlier, and FILTER's refusal quoted with
wording the code does not use.
tests/docs_examples.sh reads a fence-tag vocabulary and runs what it finds.
BASIC programs and transcripts run and are byte-compared against an `output`
block; C snippets compile with -fsyntax-only against the real include path,
which CMake writes out because it is transitive through akerror, akstdlib and
akgl; shell blocks run in a sandbox. Anything that would reconfigure the build
tree, hit the network or re-enter the suite is tagged norun with the reason in
MAINTENANCE.md, and the two cmake blocks stay hand-maintained by decision.
An untagged block is a failure rather than a default, and the pass line
reports what it executed by kind. Both exist because the way a harness like
this dies is by quietly matching nothing and passing -- which it duly did on
the first CTest run, where a generator expression evaluating to nothing still
contributed an empty argument that the script read as a filename. The count is
what caught it.
The excerpt check earns its own mention: a block tagged
`c excerpt=include/akbasic/sink.h` must still appear in that header, comments
and whitespace ignored. Compiling it would only redefine the type, so a
compile check could not have found the stale struct, and did not.
Registered as the CTest case docs_examples in both configurations. Fixing the
four wrong examples turned up two interpreter defects, fixed in the previous
commit and recorded in TODO.md section 8.
MAINTENANCE.md is new: the fence-tag reference, what to do when the case
fails, and the conventions that until now only existed inside source comments
-- the three test lists and how two of them invert "passed", the sorted verb
table, that a golden file is never edited to suit this interpreter, and that a
fix gets mutation-checked with a file copy rather than git checkout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:41:36 -04:00
|
|
|
```sh norun
|
Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
|
|
|
./build/basic # the REPL
|
2026-08-04 16:21:59 -04:00
|
|
|
./build/basic tests/language/functions.bas # run a program
|
Add mutation testing, and split the release gates into their own workflow
Ports libakstdlib's mutation harness (the newest of the three) to scripts/
mutation_test.py, adds the namespaced `mutation` CMake target the sibling
libraries have, and splits CI in two.
.gitea/workflows/ci.yaml keeps the push path: suite, ASan+UBSan, coverage, and a
mutation run bounded to src/convert.c and src/symtab.c -- about four minutes,
scoring 77.8% against a gate of 65.
.gitea/workflows/release.yaml is new and manual (workflow_dispatch). It carries
the doxygen gate, moved out of ci.yaml, and a whole-tree mutation run: 3675
mutants and hours of runner time, which is a release cost rather than a
per-commit one. Both artifacts a release wants -- api-documentation and
mutation-report -- come out of it. Two optional inputs narrow the run or change
the threshold; they arrive through the environment rather than being
interpolated into the shell, because ${{ }} substitution happens before the
shell sees the line.
The harness paid for itself immediately, which is the point of it. Three real
gaps, each checked to be a genuine bug rather than an equivalent mutant:
- errno was never asserted clear before a strtoll. Confirmed with a standalone
probe that strtoll leaves a stale errno untouched on success, so without the
`errno = 0` a valid conversion raises ERANGE.
- Nothing exercised a maximum-length symbol-table key, so every MAX_KEY - 1
off-by-one in a strncpy and its NUL terminator survived. The same hole exists
for strings in src/value.c and is filed.
- Nothing asserted a freshly initialised table was actually zeroed.
Closing the first two took the measured score from 73.1% to 77.8%.
I set the push-path threshold to 75 first, on an estimate. Measuring gave 73.1%
and the job would have failed on its first run -- the earlier per-file figure was
too high because the captured output had been truncated to its last lines and I
counted fewer survivors than there were. It is 65 now, and the gate was run as
written and confirmed to exit 0.
src/value.c is the file most worth mutating and is deliberately off the push
path: 368 mutants at ~11s each is about 70 minutes, because almost everything
links against it. A partial run over it found the same maximum-length-string
hole plus two genuinely equivalent mutants that only exist because of reference
defect section 6 item 5 -- adding both of the right operand's numeric fields
works only while the unused one is zero, so + and - are interchangeable there.
Recorded in TODO.md.
ctest 61/61; doxygen exits 0; both workflows' steps were executed locally, both
input paths included.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 07:46:53 -04:00
|
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
|
|
Execute every documented example as a test
docs/ and README.md carry 85 fenced blocks. Every one was checked by hand
exactly once, when it was written, which is not a standard that survives a
changing interpreter -- and four were already wrong: two transcripts showing a
leading space PRINT does not emit, akbasic_TextSink in README.md missing the
two members it had grown hours earlier, and FILTER's refusal quoted with
wording the code does not use.
tests/docs_examples.sh reads a fence-tag vocabulary and runs what it finds.
BASIC programs and transcripts run and are byte-compared against an `output`
block; C snippets compile with -fsyntax-only against the real include path,
which CMake writes out because it is transitive through akerror, akstdlib and
akgl; shell blocks run in a sandbox. Anything that would reconfigure the build
tree, hit the network or re-enter the suite is tagged norun with the reason in
MAINTENANCE.md, and the two cmake blocks stay hand-maintained by decision.
An untagged block is a failure rather than a default, and the pass line
reports what it executed by kind. Both exist because the way a harness like
this dies is by quietly matching nothing and passing -- which it duly did on
the first CTest run, where a generator expression evaluating to nothing still
contributed an empty argument that the script read as a filename. The count is
what caught it.
The excerpt check earns its own mention: a block tagged
`c excerpt=include/akbasic/sink.h` must still appear in that header, comments
and whitespace ignored. Compiling it would only redefine the type, so a
compile check could not have found the stale struct, and did not.
Registered as the CTest case docs_examples in both configurations. Fixing the
four wrong examples turned up two interpreter defects, fixed in the previous
commit and recorded in TODO.md section 8.
MAINTENANCE.md is new: the fence-tag reference, what to do when the case
fails, and the conventions that until now only existed inside source comments
-- the three test lists and how two of them invert "passed", the sorted verb
table, that a golden file is never edited to suit this interpreter, and that a
fix gets mutation-checked with a file copy rather than git checkout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:41:36 -04:00
|
|
|
```basic
|
Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
|
|
|
10 FOR I# = 1 TO 3
|
|
|
|
|
20 PRINT "HELLO " + I#
|
Port the README from the Go version and document embedding
Carries the reference README across, adjusted where C changes the answer: cmake
instead of make, the ak* libraries instead of the go-sdl2 bindings, and the
limits table now includes the three ceilings the Go version did not need because
it called make().
The new "Embedding the interpreter" section is the point of the rewrite, so it
states the four rules the library holds to -- nothing terminates the process,
nothing calls malloc, no file-scope mutable state, the host owns the loop -- and
each was checked against the tree rather than asserted.
Adds akbasic_runtime_load(). Writing the section turned up a real gap: a host
usually already holds its script as a string and wants the sink reserved for
output, and the only path that existed was AKBASIC_MODE_RUNSTREAM reading the
program through the sink's readline, which forces a game to point its output
device at its source text. The alternative was reaching into the header's
"internal API" block for store_line. Neither is something to put in a README.
Adds examples/embed.c, which is the code the README quotes -- a custom sink, a
bounded per-frame run, and the PASS-not-CATCH rule for a loop inside an ATTEMPT.
It is built by every build and registered as a CTest case, so a signature change
breaks the build instead of rotting the document. The README's own snippet is
compiled separately as a check; both were run before committing.
The "What Isn't Implemented / Isn't Working" section leads with the eleven
inherited defects rather than burying them, because five of them were found by
this port and a reader deserves to know that 1 - 2 - 3 computes 1 - 2 before
they hit it. Corrected two claims while verifying: the runtime is 10.1MB rather
than the ~8MB first written, and its largest single cost is the environment pool
at 4.1MB, not the source table.
ctest 60/60; ASan+UBSan 60/60; no warnings under -Wall -Wextra.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 06:42:08 -04:00
|
|
|
30 NEXT I#
|
|
|
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
|
|
Execute every documented example as a test
docs/ and README.md carry 85 fenced blocks. Every one was checked by hand
exactly once, when it was written, which is not a standard that survives a
changing interpreter -- and four were already wrong: two transcripts showing a
leading space PRINT does not emit, akbasic_TextSink in README.md missing the
two members it had grown hours earlier, and FILTER's refusal quoted with
wording the code does not use.
tests/docs_examples.sh reads a fence-tag vocabulary and runs what it finds.
BASIC programs and transcripts run and are byte-compared against an `output`
block; C snippets compile with -fsyntax-only against the real include path,
which CMake writes out because it is transitive through akerror, akstdlib and
akgl; shell blocks run in a sandbox. Anything that would reconfigure the build
tree, hit the network or re-enter the suite is tagged norun with the reason in
MAINTENANCE.md, and the two cmake blocks stay hand-maintained by decision.
An untagged block is a failure rather than a default, and the pass line
reports what it executed by kind. Both exist because the way a harness like
this dies is by quietly matching nothing and passing -- which it duly did on
the first CTest run, where a generator expression evaluating to nothing still
contributed an empty argument that the script read as a filename. The count is
what caught it.
The excerpt check earns its own mention: a block tagged
`c excerpt=include/akbasic/sink.h` must still appear in that header, comments
and whitespace ignored. Compiling it would only redefine the type, so a
compile check could not have found the stale struct, and did not.
Registered as the CTest case docs_examples in both configurations. Fixing the
four wrong examples turned up two interpreter defects, fixed in the previous
commit and recorded in TODO.md section 8.
MAINTENANCE.md is new: the fence-tag reference, what to do when the case
fails, and the conventions that until now only existed inside source comments
-- the three test lists and how two of them invert "passed", the sorted verb
table, that a golden file is never edited to suit this interpreter, and that a
fix gets mutation-checked with a file copy rather than git checkout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:41:36 -04:00
|
|
|
```output
|
Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
|
|
|
HELLO 1
|
|
|
|
|
HELLO 2
|
|
|
|
|
HELLO 3
|
Execute every documented example as a test
docs/ and README.md carry 85 fenced blocks. Every one was checked by hand
exactly once, when it was written, which is not a standard that survives a
changing interpreter -- and four were already wrong: two transcripts showing a
leading space PRINT does not emit, akbasic_TextSink in README.md missing the
two members it had grown hours earlier, and FILTER's refusal quoted with
wording the code does not use.
tests/docs_examples.sh reads a fence-tag vocabulary and runs what it finds.
BASIC programs and transcripts run and are byte-compared against an `output`
block; C snippets compile with -fsyntax-only against the real include path,
which CMake writes out because it is transitive through akerror, akstdlib and
akgl; shell blocks run in a sandbox. Anything that would reconfigure the build
tree, hit the network or re-enter the suite is tagged norun with the reason in
MAINTENANCE.md, and the two cmake blocks stay hand-maintained by decision.
An untagged block is a failure rather than a default, and the pass line
reports what it executed by kind. Both exist because the way a harness like
this dies is by quietly matching nothing and passing -- which it duly did on
the first CTest run, where a generator expression evaluating to nothing still
contributed an empty argument that the script read as a filename. The count is
what caught it.
The excerpt check earns its own mention: a block tagged
`c excerpt=include/akbasic/sink.h` must still appear in that header, comments
and whitespace ignored. Compiling it would only redefine the type, so a
compile check could not have found the stale struct, and did not.
Registered as the CTest case docs_examples in both configurations. Fixing the
four wrong examples turned up two interpreter defects, fixed in the previous
commit and recorded in TODO.md section 8.
MAINTENANCE.md is new: the fence-tag reference, what to do when the case
fails, and the conventions that until now only existed inside source comments
-- the three test lists and how two of them invert "passed", the sorted verb
table, that a golden file is never edited to suit this interpreter, and that a
fix gets mutation-checked with a file copy rather than git checkout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:41:36 -04:00
|
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
|
|
Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
|
|
|
Two things in that program are not Commodore BASIC and will catch you out immediately: variables
|
|
|
|
|
carry a **type suffix** (`I#` is an integer), and **`+` concatenates a string with a number**.
|
|
|
|
|
[Chapter 3](docs/03-the-language.md) explains both; [Chapter 13](docs/13-differences.md) is the
|
|
|
|
|
whole list of what differs from a C128.
|
Port the README from the Go version and document embedding
Carries the reference README across, adjusted where C changes the answer: cmake
instead of make, the ak* libraries instead of the go-sdl2 bindings, and the
limits table now includes the three ceilings the Go version did not need because
it called make().
The new "Embedding the interpreter" section is the point of the rewrite, so it
states the four rules the library holds to -- nothing terminates the process,
nothing calls malloc, no file-scope mutable state, the host owns the loop -- and
each was checked against the tree rather than asserted.
Adds akbasic_runtime_load(). Writing the section turned up a real gap: a host
usually already holds its script as a string and wants the sink reserved for
output, and the only path that existed was AKBASIC_MODE_RUNSTREAM reading the
program through the sink's readline, which forces a game to point its output
device at its source text. The alternative was reaching into the header's
"internal API" block for store_line. Neither is something to put in a README.
Adds examples/embed.c, which is the code the README quotes -- a custom sink, a
bounded per-frame run, and the PASS-not-CATCH rule for a loop inside an ATTEMPT.
It is built by every build and registered as a CTest case, so a signature change
breaks the build instead of rotting the document. The README's own snippet is
compiled separately as a check; both were run before committing.
The "What Isn't Implemented / Isn't Working" section leads with the eleven
inherited defects rather than burying them, because five of them were found by
this port and a reader deserves to know that 1 - 2 - 3 computes 1 - 2 before
they hit it. Corrected two claims while verifying: the runtime is 10.1MB rather
than the ~8MB first written, and its largest single cost is the environment pool
at 4.1MB, not the source table.
ctest 60/60; ASan+UBSan 60/60; no warnings under -Wall -Wextra.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 06:42:08 -04:00
|
|
|
|
Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
|
|
|
Graphics, sound and sprites need the SDL build, which is off by default because the interpreter
|
|
|
|
|
and its entire test suite build on a machine with no SDL installed at all:
|
Port the README from the Go version and document embedding
Carries the reference README across, adjusted where C changes the answer: cmake
instead of make, the ak* libraries instead of the go-sdl2 bindings, and the
limits table now includes the three ceilings the Go version did not need because
it called make().
The new "Embedding the interpreter" section is the point of the rewrite, so it
states the four rules the library holds to -- nothing terminates the process,
nothing calls malloc, no file-scope mutable state, the host owns the loop -- and
each was checked against the tree rather than asserted.
Adds akbasic_runtime_load(). Writing the section turned up a real gap: a host
usually already holds its script as a string and wants the sink reserved for
output, and the only path that existed was AKBASIC_MODE_RUNSTREAM reading the
program through the sink's readline, which forces a game to point its output
device at its source text. The alternative was reaching into the header's
"internal API" block for store_line. Neither is something to put in a README.
Adds examples/embed.c, which is the code the README quotes -- a custom sink, a
bounded per-frame run, and the PASS-not-CATCH rule for a loop inside an ATTEMPT.
It is built by every build and registered as a CTest case, so a signature change
breaks the build instead of rotting the document. The README's own snippet is
compiled separately as a check; both were run before committing.
The "What Isn't Implemented / Isn't Working" section leads with the eleven
inherited defects rather than burying them, because five of them were found by
this port and a reader deserves to know that 1 - 2 - 3 computes 1 - 2 before
they hit it. Corrected two claims while verifying: the runtime is 10.1MB rather
than the ~8MB first written, and its largest single cost is the environment pool
at 4.1MB, not the source table.
ctest 60/60; ASan+UBSan 60/60; no warnings under -Wall -Wextra.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 06:42:08 -04:00
|
|
|
|
Split the documentation by who reads it
README.md was 577 lines and answered four different questions at once: what
the project is, how to build it, every verb and function in the language, and
how to maintain the test harness. The verb and function lists had already been
written a second time in docs/11 and docs/12, which is how a list of that size
goes stale -- there is no way to notice the two have drifted apart.
README.md is now 150 lines and holds only what somebody evaluating the project
needs: what it is, the quickstart, why it was rewritten in C, the five rules
embedding imposes on the design, the two ways to use it, and where everything
else lives. Technical detail goes to docs/, maintenance to MAINTENANCE.md.
The akbasic_TextSink struct moved to docs/10-embedding.md rather than being
deleted. It was the corpus's only `c excerpt=` block -- the check that caught
the stale struct two commits ago -- so dropping it with the README would have
quietly retired a test. docs/10 also stopped claiming README.md carries the
full API surface and the pool limits, which the trim made false.
CLAUDE.md went from 458 lines to 62, because almost none of it was
agent-specific. The project goals, the Go reference and its architecture, the
dependency version and ABI rules, the four ways an embedded build collides,
the libakerror convention, the error-code range map and the style rules are
all things a maintainer needs, and they are now in MAINTENANCE.md with one
copy to keep true. CLAUDE.md points there and keeps only the rules no test
enforces: tests in the same commit asserting the correct contract, file a
missing dependency capability upstream, do not edit generated output or
tests/reference/, co-author your commits.
Four claims did not survive the move, having gone stale where nothing could
notice:
- "The repository is currently empty apart from its submodules -- no
commits, no source tree, no build files." There are 43 commits.
- libakgl's target_compile_definitions(akerror PUBLIC AKERR_MAX_ERR_VALUE)
at deps/libakgl/CMakeLists.txt:44, described as inert but present. It is
gone; only a historical mention in a comment remains.
- "akbasic_init() claims 512-767." There is no akbasic_init. It is
akbasic_error_register(), called from akbasic_runtime_init().
- Time-relative phrasing ("libakgl hit two of them in the last week").
Five places pointed at CLAUDE.md for the range map or the file-it-upstream
rule and now point at MAINTENANCE.md: include/akbasic/error.h,
src/runtime_disk.c and three entries in TODO.md. Both source changes are
comments. deps/libakgl/TODO.md cites it too and is left alone; it is a
submodule, and the rule it quotes is still reachable from CLAUDE.md.
ctest is green at 95 of 95, docs_examples included: 36 programs, 9
transcripts, 44 output comparisons, 3 C snippets, 1 excerpt.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 22:59:43 -04:00
|
|
|
```sh norun
|
|
|
|
|
cmake -S . -B build-akgl -DAKBASIC_WITH_AKGL=ON
|
|
|
|
|
cmake --build build-akgl --parallel
|
Port the README from the Go version and document embedding
Carries the reference README across, adjusted where C changes the answer: cmake
instead of make, the ak* libraries instead of the go-sdl2 bindings, and the
limits table now includes the three ceilings the Go version did not need because
it called make().
The new "Embedding the interpreter" section is the point of the rewrite, so it
states the four rules the library holds to -- nothing terminates the process,
nothing calls malloc, no file-scope mutable state, the host owns the loop -- and
each was checked against the tree rather than asserted.
Adds akbasic_runtime_load(). Writing the section turned up a real gap: a host
usually already holds its script as a string and wants the sink reserved for
output, and the only path that existed was AKBASIC_MODE_RUNSTREAM reading the
program through the sink's readline, which forces a game to point its output
device at its source text. The alternative was reaching into the header's
"internal API" block for store_line. Neither is something to put in a README.
Adds examples/embed.c, which is the code the README quotes -- a custom sink, a
bounded per-frame run, and the PASS-not-CATCH rule for a loop inside an ATTEMPT.
It is built by every build and registered as a CTest case, so a signature change
breaks the build instead of rotting the document. The README's own snippet is
compiled separately as a check; both were run before committing.
The "What Isn't Implemented / Isn't Working" section leads with the eleven
inherited defects rather than burying them, because five of them were found by
this port and a reader deserves to know that 1 - 2 - 3 computes 1 - 2 before
they hit it. Corrected two claims while verifying: the runtime is 10.1MB rather
than the ~8MB first written, and its largest single cost is the environment pool
at 4.1MB, not the source table.
ctest 60/60; ASan+UBSan 60/60; no warnings under -Wall -Wextra.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
2026-07-31 06:42:08 -04:00
|
|
|
```
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
