Adding native RND and ASC (ae2c702) made RND a function name, and a suffixed
identifier that collides with one is refused -- "SYNTAX ERROR Reserved word in
variable name". Three example programs held their PRNG output in a variable
called RND#, or a host field called RND%, and none of them had run since:
- examples/galaga/ bound RND% as a host field on both ENEMY and GAME. The
BASIC-visible name is ROLL% now; the C member stays `rnd`. This one was
caught by example_galaga and example_galaga_interop, which have been
failing.
- examples/breakout/characters/breakout.bas and examples/megademo/
megademo.bas both use RND# for their LCG output, renamed to ROLL#. Neither
is in any test, so neither failure was visible.
examples/breakout/sprites/breakout.bas was broken a second way: seven REM lines
the reader refuses. Worth recording that the ceiling is not the one the message
names -- src/sink_stdio.c fails when the read filled the buffer without seeing
a terminator, so with AKBASIC_MAX_LINE_LENGTH at 80 the message says "79
character limit" and the real maximum is 78, because a 79-character line leaves
no room for the newline. The sweeps that fixed the corpus and the megademo for
this did not reach this file. The seven comments are reflowed.
The prose went stale with the code. Chapter 21 said "there is no RND verb in
this dialect; issue #16 tracks adding one", chapter 17's historical aside
offered an LCG that no longer parses, and four REM blocks across the two games
said the same thing. All of them now say RND exists, and say why these programs
keep their own generator anyway: the sequence has to be reproducible for a
headless run to be the same game on every machine, which is what lets
interop_test.c assert exact counts.
Chapter 21 also gains the rule that bit them, since a reader writing a host
type will hit it: a host field name is a bare word and shares a namespace with
every verb and function.
None of this came from the submodule bump -- all three were already broken on
main. It was found by running the tutorial games, which nothing else does;
that gap is akbasic issue #58.
Verified: all three run clean under the dummy drivers, and 114/114 default,
116/116 with akgl.
Co-Authored-By: Andrew Kesterson <andrew@aklabs.net>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Code (Claude Opus 5, claude-opus-5[1m]) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The interop test now ends with a measured comparison: 24,000 formation
updates through the script boundary against a line-for-line C
translation of the same state machine. 881 us against 0.01 us per call
on this machine, quoted verbatim in the new chapter 21 Step 11 with the
architectural decisions it prices.
A Haiku-class cold read of the chapters produced a build whose failures
were all mechanical -- invented include paths, never-shown sink statics,
guessed status codes and character names. The chapters now carry the
include lists, the script.c statics, the status-code roster, the
sprite/character table, the full CMake recipe and the explosion spawn's
HANDLE example, so none of those have to be guessed again.
Co-authored-by: andrew <andrew@aklabs.net>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XiGgpHuXUm2mR4Wzndw3dc
A GALAGA-style fixed shooter whose engine is C on libakgl (null physics)
with the interpreter embedded as the scripting engine that owns every
enemy's behavior. One DEF-only script is called per enemy per frame
through a custom akgl_Actor update hook; SELF@, ACTOR@ and GAME@ are host
bindings, so the script reads and writes the engine's real memory -- the
boss even swaps its own damage sprite by raising an actor state bit from
BASIC. Bullets, collision, scoring and screens stay C.
Structure arguments were measured and rejected for the per-frame path:
each pointer parameter spends a value-pool slot the pool never reclaims,
1,015 calls to exhaustion against an unbounded rebind (issue #36).
Built when AKBASIC_WITH_AKGL=ON. Two CTest entries: a 600-frame headless
autoplay run under the dummy SDL drivers, and an interop round-trip test
that links the real script.c and galaga.bas and pins the four boundary
claims, 24,000 sustained calls among them. docs_galaga_figures
regenerates the two checked-in figures. Art is Kenney CC0, byte for
byte, with provenance.
Co-authored-by: andrew <andrew@aklabs.net>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01XiGgpHuXUm2mR4Wzndw3dc
