Michael Park <PICLIST@mitvma.mit.edu> wrote:

> I've developed a programming language that I'm calling Atypical.
> It's basically PIC assembly language notated to look sorta-kinda
> like a high-level language. .... I'm curious as to what real PIC
> guys might think of it, so please take a look and let me know.

Michael:

There have been other attempts at this sort of thing; the earliest
that I remember was B.LO.C, written by Anees Munshi of Butterfly
Signal Processing in the early 90's.

Personally, I have strong philosophical opposition to programming
languages like these; maybe, if I have time soon, I'll describe them
in detail.  For now, though, I just have a couple of technical
questions:

    1.  Your "do i times" loop performs the loop test at the END of
    the loop, so i=0 results in 256 (or 65536, or whatever)
    iterations.  Is that what you intended?

    2.  Speaking of which, I only see unsigned bytes in your
    example.  Is there any facility for multi-byte (or signed)
    variables?

    3.  Your lookup tables don't do any PCLATH manipulation.  Is
    that because your example happens to fit on one page, or is
    PCLATH adjustment (like register-bank adjustment) expected to be
    performed by the user?

    4.  If users DO need to perform PCLATH manipulation manually, is
    there a symbol for the current value of the PC (like MPASM's "$"
    symbol), so users can use that value in their compile-time
    calculations?

    5.  Is there a way to emit error or warning messages at compile
    time, perhaps using a mechanism like MPASM's "error" directive?

-Andrew

=== Andrew Warren -- aiw@cypress.com
=== Principal Design Engineer
=== Cypress Semiconductor Corporation
===
=== Opinions expressed above do not
=== necessarily represent those of
=== Cypress Semiconductor Corporation

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