> Damn, beaten by a couple of days... ;-)
> I have also just finished an assembler for pics, just the
> documentation and a bit more testing left to do before its released.

Heh ;-) I skipped the docs part altogether, which probably saved a
couple of days...

> Compared to topic is has:
>
> pros: macros, real expressions, conditional assembly, local variables
> and labels, 12 and 14bit pics, a simple disassembler.

Sounds great!

> cons: own object file format (with conversion tools to and from
> intel hex.)

This is not necessarily a con; running those conversion tools
is anyway easiliy automated as needed.

> C format numbers (i.e. 0xff etc), and error handling
> is "simplistic" and finally no clever name (topic, aspic) thought
> up yet ;-)

Well, it seems a bit hotter than Topic, so maybe Tropic would be nice? ;-)

> Ian
>
> p.s. votes for next tool being taken, simulator or picstart code downloader.
> p.p.s. does anyone know the format of the picstart download protocol or
> e-mail address for someone at microchip who might know.

A picstart code downloader should be pretty easy and very desirable to
get out of the MSDOG/Windows dependance (I just hate to have to boot
my PC ten times a day whenever the system crashes; not that booting
takes such a long time but it interrupts my flow of thoughts).

For the simulator which I'm sure we'll build sooner or later, I've
been thinking of using the combination of C and Tcl/Tk (see
comp.lang.tcl).  Tcl is a rather nice library that would give the
simulator great scripting capabilities, while Tk is a GUI toolkit for
Tcl with the look and feel of Motif.  Tcl/Tk interfaces very well with
C allowing the simulator to be written partly in Tcl (faster to
edit/test/fix) and partly in C (faster final code); thus one can start
most of it off in Tcl and then code the timecritical parts in C
routines as needed.  Tk provides some nice features that are ideal for
a CPU simulator, or any program that needs to update screen data as
variables change.
  Tcl/Tk come with an X11 or BSD type public license and are available
under both Unix/X11 (Linux, for example) and MSDOS/Windows (for those
unfortunate of you ;-), so the simulator could be used by a large
number of people.

-- vinsci