ws21

Decompilations / ports of Whitesmiths 2.1 tools

The latest versions now build cleanly with gcc

A number of bugs have been fixed.

A breaking change is that the cpp to cp1 interface no longer converts numbers to pdp-11 format. The cp1 to cp2 interface does however convert to pdp-11 format and this allows the CP/M based cp2 pass to be used.

The tools

disrel - this is a tool I wrote around 2007 that disassembles Whitesmiths' 8080 object files. I have recently updated to make sure it compiles cleanly for x64 builds. There was a corresponding tool to extract object files from archives, but since the port of lib this is no longer needed Usage: disrel [-8] file where -8 will generate a-natural format files vs. standard asm files and the file is the file to disassemble

anat - this is my decompilation and porting of the Whitesmiths' anat tool to compile under 32/64 bit. The work was originally done in 2008 with recent changes to make sure it compiles cleanly for x64 builds.

as80, lib, link - these are my decompilations from June 2020 of the corresponding Whitesmiths' 2.1 tools and ports to make them compile under 32/64 bit.

Note I fixed a couple of bugs in the originals files, namely

• as80 - in define the original code had a variable declared as char rather than char *
• link - the processing of v7 libraries incorrectly read too few bytes from the header

Other than the fixes most of the code is as close to the original decompilation as I could make it, the key changes are as follows

1. File I/O is now done using the C standard FILE * functions. The originals had a mix of raw I/O and Whitesmiths' own buffered file I/O routines
2. Simple modifications to use standard C libraries e.g. lenstr -> strlen, cpybuf -> memcpy.
3. A port of the Whitesmiths' getflags function. This required major modifications as the original assumed all parameters were on the stack and sizeof(int) == sizeof(pointerType). This necessitated some changes to the callers of getflags as the option to return a list of items also made the same assumption
4. Ports of the getfiles and getbfiles, modified to use FILE * rather than int file descriptors
5. Implementation of a small number of Whitesmiths' functions, modified to use standard C.
6. Adding dummy arguments where the function call did not match the function prototype.
7. Changes to as80 to use intptr_t as the original assumed sizeof(int) == sizeof(pointerType). Appropriate typecasts were added where the variables were used.

Whilst I have done some testing of the code, e.g. library add/delete, checking link by building the whitesmiths' executables and assembling echo.s, there are likely to be some bugs. If you identify any, please let me know and I will look to fix them.

cpp - the c pre-processor pass of the Whitesmiths' V2.1 C compiler

Most of the changes are similar to the other ports, although I have had to implement a number of additional support functions as follows

1. The original code relies on the Whitesmiths' I/O processing in that it writes #define entries based on the command line into the initial I/O buffer, rather than creating the defines explicitly. This required a customised version of getl to support this. The routine also assumes EOF when a NULL is read
2. alloc, free (wsfree) and frelst. The Whitesmith's routines are used extensively. I wrote simple wrapper functions to synthesise these.
3. The biggest change was to support Whitesmiths' double format. Unfortunately it is different from the IEEE standards used and although it has less range, it has higher precision. I implemented a simplistic solution that converts ascii strings to a suitable double and in doing so I identified some issues with the Whitesmiths' format, especially around rounding. In general I believe my solution has better precision and is more tolerant to overflow/underflow, however it does mean that the least significant bits may be different. So far I have observed a difference of up to 2 in least significant byte of the matissa. Given the poor performance of and some errors in the original 8080 code, I do not intend to modify my code, other than for genuine errors anyone identifies.
4. Three routines used variable number of arguments. They have been modified to use stdarg.
5. btos & btol implemented

cp1 - the parser pass of Whitesmiths' V2.1 C compiler

Similar changes as per cpp above. Many changes due to the shared storage of int and pointers. Additionally many casts as there are common functions that manipulate various structures. Work ideally needs to be done to clean this up now that the code does at least compile some C source.

Note, this cleanly compiles echo.c from the standard Whitesmith's distribution and a few other small files I have tried. More extensive testing is required to verify that it is a usable port.

Mark Ogden

14-Jul-2021