sergio masci wrote: > It's hard to > justify taking 10 to 20 times longer to produce a program I wasn't going to get into this food fight, and was going to silently ignore that the HLL folks are making the implicit and sometimes incorrect assumption that assembler takes longer to write. This statement however is so far into the rediculous zone that I can't let it go. Asm only takes "10 to 20 times" longer to write if you compare a good HLL programer with a incompetent assembly programmer. My own experience, mostly with Microchip C18, is that it probably takes 20% to 50% longer to do the same thing in C18 when you look at the full end to end time, including debugging. I haven't got any hard numbers to back that up, but that's just a feeling from doing a few mixed MPASM/C18 projects. Maybe it's partly a perception due to the high hassle factor (C18 does some very stupid things with FSRs, the data stack, and subroutine linkage that effect the whole project) and that bugs are much harder to track down in C18. Maybe it's partly because the C18 code I had to deal with was poorly written and poorly documented (a old version of the Microchip TCP/IP stack) and had some serious bugs that were difficult to track down, which isn't helped by the fact the MPLAB debugging for C18 is much worse than for MPASM. But debugging is a real and legitimate part of a project, so C18 looses by a definite margin for me. About the only time I can see C to be a win is for lots of wide arithmetic. It's definitely easier to write a single equation in C than to write all the various math library calls. However, this kind of code is a rarety in PICs, and even when it does crop up is just a small part of a project. Writing that one module in C and dealing with all the restrictions and uncomfortable conventions that imposes on the whole project is hardly worth it. If it only takes 10 minutes to write the math calls in assembler, then the best the compiler can save is 10 minutes. When it comes to low level bit twiddling, MPASM is easier to begin with. ******************************************************************** Embed Inc, Littleton Massachusetts, http://www.embedinc.com/products (978) 742-9014. Gold level PIC consultants since 2000. -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist