BillW wrote...

>On Monday, Mar 1, 2004, at 14:19 US/Pacific, Dave Dilatush wrote:
>
>>Rich wrote...
>
>>> Anyhow - is there some inherent advantage of absolute mode that
>>> I'm missing?
>>
>> Nope.  It sucks bad gas.
>
>Well, you'll learn more about the PIC architecture, and probably
>"assembly language programming concepts" in general, by writing
>in "absolute" mode.  It's just closer to raw...

Having done both, I don't understand this statement.  What is
there about writing absolute code, instead of relocatable code,
that gives it any more learning value?

>Make the assembler
>too fancy by adding a linker and such, and you might as well use one
>of those awful High Level Languages!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get a sense here that you may be
conflating use of the linker itself (i.e., working with
relocatable code) with massive use of macros and conditional
assembly (along with the linker, of course) to create an
comprehensive, processor-independent development environment with
a rich assortment of built-in functions (like Olin's development
environment, for example).

But that's not what I'm talking about, not at all: I'm talking
about simply using the linker to make code more modular and
easier to re-use, make projects easier to manage, and drastically
reduce the amount of hair-pulling while coding.

It does this very, very well, and I almost NEVER use macros or
conditional assembly.  Yes, there's a certain "Zen" to using it
effectively, and I figure on going into that in the MPLINK
tutorial I'm working on; but there's nothing "fancy" about it.

>A fair number of PIC projects
>have some amount of "education" in their goals...

Agreed.

Dave D.

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