Johnny Lindholm wrote:

> I'm into my second week of PIC-programming, until now I've mostly done
> 68000 assembler.

  Herein this lies the clue.  This man is Motorola-literate (as I am).
He is used to the far more elegant and straightforward DEC/ Motorola/
Mostek/ Synertek/ Commodore/ Atmel notation where you know it's hex
because it says so: "$".  Makes writing compilers dead easy.

  Sorry John, you're down among the plebs now!  Intel wanted to be
different, and - they achieved it.
--
  Cheers,
        Paul B.