Ken Pergola wrote...

>Would anyone want to share any object-oriented programming techniques they
>use when programming PICs in assembly language?
>I realize this is a pretty open-ended question -- but I thought it would
>stir up some interesting dialog.

For PIC assembly language, the closest you're likely to come to
what are called "object-oriented" programming techniques is to
take advantage of the encapsulation available with the linker.
Check Microchip's MPLAB, MPASM, and MPLINK documentation for the
[gory] details, particularly the sections in the MPASM manual on
writing relocatable code.

>Even though all PIC RAM is global, are there any good techniques to try to
>simulate local variables in PIC assembly language?

There's no "try to simulate" about it: that's precisely what the
linker allows you to do.  All symbols (for both code and
variables) are local to the module (.asm file) in which they are
defined, unless they are explicitly made visible to the code in
other modules by using the GLOBAL directive.  This makes it easy
to break up your code into modules that are functionally coherent
(e.g., math, serial comm, interrupts, initialization, main
routine, etc.) and which contain both the variable definitions
and the code which manipulates them- and with only as many of the
details exposed to the outside world (i.e., the rest of the files
in the project) as are necessary.

About a year ago I put up a [very] small example project using
MPLINK, at:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/dilatush/lnkdemo2.zip

It doesn't amount to much, just a few modules, and the code
itself doesn't do anything at all; but it illustrates the basic
ideas.

At first, after years of writing code in absolute mode, I had
trouble getting used to the linker; but now, I find it makes life
one heck of a lot easier.

HTH...

Dave

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