Alan B. Pearce wrote :

> The assembler has no visibility of what the EQU statement
> is for other than to assign a value to a name.

Just as CBLOCK.

> For CBLOCK the programmer only needs to specify the first 
> RAM address

Rather "first value". There is no given that it's an "RAM address".
It *could* be, just as in the EQU case (where you used the
term "value" anyway) By using different terms ("value" vs. "address")
one could make someone belive that there is a real difference
in this regard between EQU and CBLOCK. Could be nitpicking,
but I feel that clearily counts i this case. :-)

> The program writer does need to keep track of when the
> CBLOCK will overflow a bank though,...

And that the "value" actualy corresponds to a real RAM
in the specific PIC, and not e.g an SFR. Again, just as with EQU.

> However I did like Bob Ammermans use of it to ENUMERATE 
> values, but I prefer Olins preprocessor macros to achieve
> the same result...

Which of Olins macros creates enumerated values ?
(I know of the FLAG macros, but that's not the same thing...)

> For RES the programmer does not keep track of where in RAM 
> the location is, apart from specifying that it be in a named area,
> but the trick here is that the named area is declared outside of
> the RES statement, which is not intuitive to the beginner.

Not only outside of the RES directive, but outside of the
whole (ASM) source code !

> The writer of the LINKER script (could be the same person as
> the programmer, but not necessarily)...

IMHO, very few have to change the builtin linker scripts as they
are delivered from Microchip. Maybe if you are building a
specialized development environment (as Olin) but not
the normal user developing with MPLAB. IMHO... ;-)

Best Regards,
Jan-Erik.



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