If you want to get the most into a PIC, the only way is lovingly crafted
assembler, with lots of macros to make things more portable/readable.  High
level languages have way too much overhead.  That is what I have done with
some of my radio projects.  I believe my code has got all the function into
16C57, with about 20% ROM safety margin, in half the space any one else
could do it in a higher level language, but I always was modest.

In some cases, we have used C: we can create a 2 platform project, with
common code, a Windows 'shell' and a PIC 'shell'.  Test it on Windows, port
it to PIC.  We tend to move from 16C57 to 16C65 and eventually to 17C44
with 32 K external ROM purchased from funny sources to get around the port
limitations and lots of agravation with far pointers to RAM.

If this pointer stuff is fixed, someone tell me which version, because I
think it is still a problem: 8 bit = near = RAM, 16 bit = far = ROM, how do
you define a 9 bit pointer in C?  We tend to use a lot of structures and
pointers in our code, our projects just work out that way, or isit the
people?

Enough already.