Maarten Hofman wrote:

>> Modern ANSI C might be device independent to a certain extent.
>However, the C language was never intended to be such.
>
Well, we will probably just have to agree to disagree about that.

>> In fact, it is
>a glorified version of assembly, originally written for a specific
>type of processor. It has clear shortcuts (++ for "increment register"
>for example) meant to map directly on certain assembly instructions.
>  
>
Irrelevant and immaterial.  The C language is and was defined by the 
book "The C Programming Language" by Kernighan and Ritchie.  The only 
concession made to architecture was to the size of the word.  Most 
certainly I will agree that they developed the language on a machine 
which had a specific architecture (actually, I believe they had several 
machines, but the architectures were similar -- at any rate, all were 
Von Neumann machines).  So what?

>> But even now there are various devices (I think most of the <18F
>PICmicro line falls into that category) that are not entirely suited
>for this purpose, and an implementation of ANSI C on these devices,
>though possible, would be so costly that an application written in
>that language would not run very well on them. A version of C
>specifically designed for such devices might be more suited, and maybe
>a language unlike C might be even more so.
>  
>
You are agreeing with Olin, and I agree with Olin also.  So we all come 
to the same point, do we not??  :-)

John

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