What's the deal with negative numbers?

[RealNC]

I'm getting weirdness when writing negative numbers to disk:

Code: Select all

writefile "test" {
    writeval (-1)
    writeval (-2)
}

readfile "test" {
    print number readval number readval
}

I'm getting 255 and 254 as output.

Can you guys please test on the official terp? Do you get the same result?

[Roody_Yogurt]

Whoops, I didn't see this thread, but yes, I can verify it gives those values with the official terp, too.

[RealNC]

Thanks. Good to know it's not just me. This is obviously going to affect opcodes that take negative values, so it needs fixing at some point.

[Roody_Yogurt]

I'm sure you already know all this, but here's what the manual says about negative numbers:

VALUE (i.e., INTEGER CONSTANT):
<value> <2>
A value may range from -32768 to 32767; negative numbers follow signed-value
16-bit convention by being x + 65536 where x is a negative number.
For example, the values 10 ($0A), 16384 ($4000), and -2 would be written
as:
$4B 0A 00
$4B 00 40
$4B FE FF ($FFFE = 65534 = -2 + 65536)

Does writing to file use a different type of encoding so something is lost in translation?

(I have no idea how any of this works)

[RealNC]

The issue is that what actually happens when writing numbers to a file doesn't follow that description, as is apparent when trying to read the value back. You get something different than what you wrote.

The engine writes two bytes per value to files, in little-endian format. Except that for negative numbers between -1 and -255 it writes the same bytes as for the positive numbers between 255 and 1.

"writeval (-1)" writes "FF 00". "writeval 255" also writes "FF 00".

Looks like a bug.

[Roody_Yogurt]

Dan Shiovitz helped me come up with a fix for this.

In herun.c:

Code: Select all

			case WRITEVAL_T:
			{
Writevalloop:
				codeptr++;
				i = GetValue();
#if !defined (MATH_16BIT)
				if (i < 0)
					i += 65536;
#endif
				if (ioblock)
				{
					if ((ioblock==2)
						|| fputc(i%256, io)==EOF
						|| fputc(i/256, io)==EOF)
					{
						ioerror = true;
						retflag = true;
						break;
					}
				}

				if (Peek(codeptr)==COMMA_T)
					goto Writevalloop;

				if (game_version>=23) codeptr++; /* eol */
				break;
			}

In heexpr.c:

Code: Select all

		case READVAL_T:
		{
			val = 0;
			if (ioblock)
			{
				int low, high;
				if ((ioblock==1)
					|| (low = fgetc(io))==EOF
					|| (high = fgetc(io))==EOF)
				/* fscanf() caused trouble for non-ASCII values
					(fscanf(io, "%c%c", &a, &b)==EOF) */
				{
					ioerror = true;
					retflag = true;
				}
				else
				{
				 	i = low + high*256;
#if !defined (MATH_16BIT)
					if (i > 32767)
						i -= 65536;
#endif
					val = i;
				}
			}
			codeptr++;
			break;
		}