On Apr 24, 2005, at 7:00 PM, Byron A Jeff wrote:

> The fact of the matter is that the 18F architecture simplifies
> stuff because it lessens issues with banking.
>
A point of contention seems to be the degree to which things should be
simplified for the "beginning user."  A rich set of peripherals is nice,
but is more to understand, especially if your goal is along the lines of
getting people used to bit twiddling.  A CPU with fewer banking issues 
is
nice too, unless you want to convey the idea that many microcontrollers
have annoying little "quirks" that users will have to learn to work 
with.

Imagine a single-chip PDP-11 (with memory, flash, uarts, and pins to 
control)
In some sense, that would be a wonderful thing.  Or something 
implementing
Knuth's made-up assembler language.  In some other sense, those would be
really nice teaching aids.  In another sense, they'd present such an 
incomplete
view of the world that they'd be near useless.

(Hmm.  Corollary:  Any class in "assembly language" should teach at 
least two
different architectures.)

(There is now the pic16F54 as a chip even simpler than the F84...)

BillW
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