On Thu, 18 Sep 2003 18:13:39 -0400, Olin Lathrop wrote:
> > 1.  A C to PIC compiler
>
> You're not ready for that yet.  Do the first few projects in assembler
> until you get familiar with what is going on at the instruction level.
> Then, if you still want to, you can try programming in a higher level
> language.  On small resource limited systems with specialized hardware
> like PICs, you are never that far from the hardware.  You need to
> understand what is going at the low levels even if the source code is
> in a
> high level language.

Actually, Olin makes a great point here. If you don't understand the
guts of a PIC and can't read the assembler output from the C compiler
you'll be hopelessly lost the first time you have a small problem (and
that will happen early on... ;))

And as Olin pointed out, a great "starter kit" (MPLAB and all it's
goodies) is available from Microchip for free.

I sometimes forget that I pounded out 100,000's of lines of assembler
code before I ever touched a C compiler (kicking and screaming at the
time).

Matt Pobursky
Maximum Performance Systems

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