>> let me say that there are, or have been, or will be, people
>> who had a C course in college, get into doing PIC programming
>> as a hobby thing, and assume that they are well prepared to
>>  start programming the little buggers since they know C.

You've never given us an example of what you're objecting to.
No doubt there are features that missing or look different
from regular C (pointers, and especially strings (which are
far more common.))  Hopefully there are some added features
that make some embedded things easier (bit variables?)  Yet
I've written  C programs for a PIC (not C30 - but still a
PIC C compiler of questionable merit...)

OTOH, without a bit of training or thought to embedded systems,
the average person "who had *a* C course in college" is likely
to write

main() {
	double voltage;
	scanf("%f" voltage);
	printf("%f6.3", voltage/10.0);	
	exit(0);
}

and then ask piclist "How do I get the A-D converter on my PIC
to look like STDIN, and the LCD I have connected to look like
STDOUT, and how some it says this won't fit in 12F675?"
(ok, so I've never actually seen a question THAT clueless, but
the average college graduate probably has a very sketchy
knowledge of pointers beyond that used for strings, for example,
if things are anywhere close to what they were in the old days.
(But perhaps they aren't.  IIRC, CS majors at Penn had to learn
PL/1 (well, PL/C) as freshmen, after which everything had to be
written in fortran, since that was what actually talked to anything.))

BillW
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