On Aug 19, 2005, at 4:29 PM, Jose Da Silva wrote:

> Just suppose that a basic-variant chip costs $1.00, but if you can
> justify the labour of doing it in assembler into a chip that cost
> 0.30 and you are building 100,000 units, that would be an extra
> $70,000 in your pocket if you cut costs.

But that's not the situation that exists (existed) with basic51;
I could buy (theoretically) a basic51 chip for $20, and polish
off a quick basic-power application in a couple days.  If I needed
to make, say, 20 of them, I could buy blank 8752s, download the
standard published basic51 interpreter and my code, and be done
rather faster than rewriting for a compiler, and at not much more
hardware cost than a compiled/assembled solution.

A basic stamp type device covers the first article, and after a
hundred or so it becomes pretty attractive to recode in assembler
or whatever and aim at the cheapest possible chip, but not much
is addressing the "20" case.

And my point is not so much that it would be extremely valuable,
but that it ought to be EASY.  Fitting a FP basic in an 8051 with
8k of rom might have been tough.  Fitting the same thing in a
pic18f with 16kwords of flash ought to be easier.  Fitting it in
something like an LPC2104 (arm with 128k flash) ought to be trivial
Easy enough for chip vendors to do as often as they port GCC.  Easy
enough that you don't need to do a detailed analysis of whether it
serves a market or not; just having it available

(of course, arguably for it to be so easy, there needs to be a
portable language version first, and each chip needs a compiler
for the language before it can get the interpreter, and once you
have that compiler, you probably don't need the interpreter as
much any more.  But still...)

BillW
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