John,

My grandfather would sit me on his knee and tell me the
story of Henry Ellis.

Henry Ellis was a boy that was caught stealing sheep when he
was 19 years old.  And he was hanged before he reached 20.
The judge said at his trial "I sure hate to see a young man
go bad."

Henry's story was that he took the first sheep out of necessaity.
The second was just too damn convienent.  After that, well,
he was a sheep thief and what they do is steal sheep.

When I see conditional assemblys mentioned, I remember the
story of Henry Ellis, and "I hate to see a young man go bad."

Conditional's add a leval of complexity to a program as
far as the programmer/maintainer is concerned.  And it makes
understanding the code just that much harder.  When you
find yourself asking the question "Can I nest conditional's?"
Well, you are fully a sheep thief.

While it is sometimes necessary to modify code for debugging
reasons, there is a pitfall.  Any changes made for debugging
must be restored before the final program is assembled.  And
sometime you may find your self looking for a problem that
is caused by code that was installed while debugging.

I try to make it a pratice to start remarks for any temporary
debugging code with $$$.  This allows a search on $$$ to
show the patches that are to be removed.

Bill C.   bill@cornutt.com

Writting a program is like fathering a child.
You must give it love, understanding and support
for the rest of your life.


----------
>
> John,
>         Try enclosing the block of code with
>
>     ifdef TAKE_THIS_OUT
>         ...code...
>
>     endif
>
> Dave Reinagel
> daver@cisco.com
>
>
> > From JBellini@STATPOWER.COM Tue Jun  2 15:53:47 1998
> > X-SMAP-Received-From: outside
> > X-Priority: 3
> > MIME-Version: 1.0
> > Date:         Tue, 2 Jun 1998 15:20:20 -0700
> > From: John Bellini <JBellini@STATPOWER.COM>
> > Subject:      How do comment out more than one line in Microchip Assembly?
> > To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> >
> > To comment out a line we use the ';'
> >
> > How do you comment out a whole section?  In "C" we use the "/*" & "*/".
> > What about in Microchip Assembly?
> >
> > John Bellini
> >
>