> I hope you will agree that the greatest benefit in using co-operative
> multitasking over pre-emptive multitasking is the ability to
> control where task switching occurs.

Which is also its weaknes: if you don't care where it occurs, but do
care that it occurs as soon as possible, cooperative multitasking is not
what you want. I am not arguing that it does not have its use, but I'd
rather make my own choice than being forced by the hardware.

> I
> personally consider
> the lose of pre-emptively multitasking on the PIC 16 series
> only a small
> annoyance and not a serious drawback.

I disagree. Luckily we both live in democracies :)

> way I see 16 bit arithmetic on the PIC - instead of one
> instruction to do a 16
> bit add I must use a few, instead of one instruction to do a
> "call" I sometimes
> need to use a few.

Now you are pointing at another big deficiency of the 12/14 cores: the
lack of an add (or sub) with carry. Any CPU with add-with-carry will run
circles around a poor PIC trying to do multibyte arithmetic, especially
when the inputs are in different banks.

Wouter van Ooijen

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Van Ooijen Technische Informatica: www.voti.nl
consultancy, development, PICmicro products

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