--- wouter van ooijen <wouter@voti.nl> 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.
> 
> No 'general truth' is true in all corner cases, but
> the consensus in
> literature (and this agrees with my experience) is
> that programming
> takes the same amount of time per line of code
> *regardless of the
> language used*. In most cases a HLL will produce
> more per line, so it
> will be more productive. But the figures I remember
> from literature were
> more in the 2 .. 5 range. Bit twiddeling and
> accurate timing will favour
> assembly (sometimes enough to reverse the advantage
> of an HLL into a
> disadvantge), complex HLL constructs (when used
> appropriately!!!) (like
> arrays, floating point, and some OO constructs) will
> favour a HLL.
> 
> I give programming classes in both HLL (C, C++) and
> assembler (PIC, ARM)
> to both electronics and informatics students. It
> will not be a surprise
> that the informatics students are better at
> programming, but in my
> experience the difference is more pronounced for HLL
> programming than
> for assembler programming. Or to put it in another
> way: electronics
> students are comparatively better at assembler
> programming. I don't know
> why, but this might partly explain why the piclist
> community is more
> assembler-oriented than most other groups I know.
> 
> Wouter van Ooijen
> 
>
  It is that detail understanding makes an EE a better
programmer in general. I tend to see CS/IT grads just
hammering the keyboard without the appreciation for
CPU resources...

John


      ____________________________________________________________________________________
Never miss a thing.  Make Yahoo your home page. 
http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
-- 
http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive
View/change your membership options at
http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist