James Musselman <PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU> wrote:

> the discussion was about C programming, not assembly.

    Sorry, James... I guess I wasn't clear enough; I was claiming
    that arrays of bits were common in ASSEMBLY programs.

    My original assertion ("arrays of bits are very common in PIC
    applications") was in response to Clyde Smith-Stubbs' comment
    that "since there's no bit pointer type supported by the hardware
    .... to implement [bit arrays] in software would be horribly
    inefficient."

    All I was saying was that such structures couldn't be all THAT
    inefficient if they were already being used in lots of existing
    PIC programs.  Since they're so commonly used (and relatively
    easy to implement) by assembly-language programmers, I felt that
    they should also be available to C programmers.

    Those existing PIC programs to which I was referring were
    assembly-language programs, not C programs.  This was made
    clearer in my next message to Clyde... He said, "I seriously
    doubt you ever even considered using a pointer to a bit in an
    assembler program" and I replied that I had not only CONSIDERED
    using them, but that I use them often enough that I've written
    MPASM macros to automate the task.

> I don't believe arrays of bits, or bit operations in general for
> that matter,  are well supported (?) in any of the existing
> compilers.

    We're in violent agreement here; in fact, this is exactly the
    point I was originally making.

    Sorry for the misunderstanding.

    -Andy

Andrew Warren - fastfwd@ix.netcom.com
Fast Forward Engineering, Vista, California
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2499