On Sun, 19 Jan 2003, Wouter van Ooijen wrote:

> > I can afford to waste a few KB or even a few MB of
> > memory on a PC or a UNIX (snip)
> > You simply don't have that luxury on a PIC.
>
> That is nonsense, or more to the point: it does not always hold.

8< snip...

I stand by my original statement.  It was asked why it's so much more
imporatnt to learn assembly and the hardware details of a PIC, I answered.
Code space is very limited on a PIC, and RAM is minimal.  That's why it is
so much more important.

> Sow when you want to give anyone a meaningfull advice, first try to
> figure out in which of the two situations he (she) will be. A hobbyist
> is not likely to be in the 'unit cost dominates' situation, unless he
> values his time very very low.

It doesn't matter whether you're trying to bang out a one-off hobby
project or a million unit per month low-cost device, the same advice
holds.  Learn the hardware and the instruction set first, THEN decide
whether to move up to a higher level language.  And a hobbyis usually DOES
place a low value his or her time, since they're presumably doing it for
fun and to learn.

Don't take this to mean that I don't think you should use a HLL for PIC
projects.  I haven't coded anything in ASM since my very first project a
few years ago.  I switched to C and never looked back.  But I can look at
the listing generated by the compiler and tell whether it's doing things
in a reasonable way, and see where better speed or code efficiency can be
had.  It even lets me find the occasional bug.  If I didn't speak ASM and
didn't know the hardware as well as I do, half my projects would never get
finished.

Dale

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