Richard Mulvey wrote :

> Hi All:
>
> I'm one of the relative newbies to the PIC ( and
> microcontrollers
> in general ), here, though I come from 15 years in applications
> development in C/C++/Java etc.  One thing I've noticed is that the
> vast majority of asm code I find relating to the PIC is all written
> in absolute mode, and not relocatable mode.  Is there any particular
> reason for that?

Simplicity, maybe ? And old habits.

> It seems more than a little odd to find extensive
> web pages full of projects, in which the same code is simply
> duplicated
> over and over in multiple copies of files, some of which are obviously
> just earlier versions that never got updated.  In one of the books
> I'm reading, the author explicitly states that he never uses
> relocatable mode, because the linker is too slow, etc.

Just silly... Must be a realy old book from the IBM PC-XT timeframe :-)

> Anyhow - is there some inherent advantage of absolute mode that
> I'm missing?

It *is* easier to learn as a newbie.

> It seems like just having a library of routines available
> that can be easily source controlled and made availible to multiple
> projects makes far more sense than the endless use of include files.

Absolutly !   :-) :-)

I begun using relocatable code simply by just starting using
the development environment that Olin Lathrop provides (for free !).
See : "www.embedinc.com/pic/".

It just worked out-of-the-box, and I can't (yet) claim to know
everything about reloc.code for PICs. But like you, I have a long
history of using linkers on PDP11 and VAXes so the basic concepts
were well known to me...

Best Regards,
Jan-Erik.

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