On Sunday, Jan 18, 2004, at 17:08 US/Pacific, Andrew Kieran wrote:

> The limitations of the 16F series helped to show how the chip
> works.  For example, when students asked "Why can't I copy from
> register X to register Y", they could lookup the 14 bit opcode
> and see that there is no room in the 14-bit program memory to
> store the instruction, a source register, and a destination.
> Similar discoveries about banking and paging also proved to be
> be great learning opportunities for the students.

Exactly the sort of thing I was trying to express.  In the old
days, certain issues MIGHT have been covered in a good assembly
language class, but it's real difficult to justify assembly on
a 2GHz PC with a gig of ram. :-)  (Of course, there are simulators.
Even in my day, the pdp-11 part of the assembly language class was
taught using a simulator running on the mainframe...)  An embedded
programming class is about dealing with limitations that aren't
present on a desktop-class machine, and about the closeness of
hardware and firmware.  If it's too easy, you don't learn enough.
register and memory banking schemes of assorted level of obscurity
are rampant in microcontrollers; avoiding the issues in the 16F
series by using 18Fs is less 'educational'...

BillW

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