Olin's right.  Use C and you won't know the difference.

Andy


At 05:28 PM 11/12/02 -0500, you wrote:
>>         Unfortunately, MPASM can't deal with macros that aren't
>>         fixed-length.  Fortunately, however, Microchip now include a
>>         separate linker with their dev tools, so if you're one of
>>         those people who use MPLINK, you can go ahead and write all
>>         the varying-length macros that you want.
>
>Everyone should be using the linker.  Talking about absolute mode here is
>just a waste of bandwidth and does a disservice to newbies who might get
>the impression it is a reasonable option.  Unfortunately many Microchip
>examples still use the archaic absolute mode, which gives the impression
>that it's the preferred way to use MPLAB.  It's not.  Relocatable mode
>allows you to write much cleaner software, takes about the same effort to
>learn, but makes writing the code easier and less error prone.
>
>This issue only comes up because there is an absolute mode, which is there
>for historic reasons.  Relocatable code using a linker is the normal way
>to do software development in general.  Nobody complains that all Windows
>development uses relocatable objects.  It's just the way it's done.
>Microchip would do a big service if they supported absolute mode only with
>a special -OLD command line option and said it was not recommended for new
>designs.
>
>I know I've probably offended some people that still cling to absolute
>mode because relocatable mode is "too hard to learn".  Usually this means
>they haven't really looked at it and are using absolute mode from long ago
>and feel threatened by the "new" stuff.  In reality, all instructions are
>the same, and most directives too.  Some directives have different names
>(CODE instead of ORG), but work pretty much the same way.  Then there are
>things that make relocatable mode easier to write, like separate modules
>each with its own namespace, properly working macros (I didn't know about
>the fixed size limitation before), no page boundaries within a module, and
>no more manually trying to fit various routines into specific pages.  All
>in all, relocatable mode is clearly better and a little easier than
>absolute mode.
>
>
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