On August 19, 2005 04:58 pm, William Chops Westfield wrote:
>
> 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

With 30some instructions and a huge number of example app notes, the pic 
seems simple enough to program using assembler. Debugging a PIC at the 
assembler level is trivial versus having to deal with middleware which 
may be hiding a couple of bugs or limitations like reusing registers 
under different functions etc.
Some of the PIC app notes boast how you could do some things with fewer 
instructions and faster on a pic versus a 68xx or 805x or other chip, 
so putting a program to run a program sort of detracts from what 
attracts people to the pic.
I could imagine a software-only person pulling out their hair trying to 
figure-out why their BASIC app didn't PEEK or POKE a value as expected, 
which is sort of what you expect a hi-level language to "take-care" of 
for you. On the other hand, assembler may seem a little intimidating at 
first, but looking at a basic PIC, assembler really ain't all that 
confusing to work with.

> (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...)

Perhaps Microchip didn't see the justification in building a pic basic, 
plus it would also be telling us 3rd-party developers to "go away".
At this point, Microchip can boast several 3rd party products like 
parallax basic stamp, several C suppliers, etc.
You can't really say the same in terms of other chips out there where 
the manufacture does the chip, the compiler and the whole thing....

...so, having said that... Necessity is the mother of invention.
If you think there is a big enough demand, then the field is wide-open 
for you to explore the opportunity.    Start coding a compiler!     ;-)
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