All,

I agree that everyone should program some projects in assembly language
for the experience.
However, as I have stated before, I believe the HLL's are somewhat
over-rated for the PIC's.
I do all of my programming in assembly, unless the customer specifically
asks for C or BASIC,
or whatever.  I have tried many HLL's and always come back to assembler.


However, I have no problem with snyone using an HLL for PIC's.  It's a
personal choice most
of the time, so whatever one feels most comfortable with is what they
should go with.

I personally like the compactness of the code and the fine detail I get
with assembler that 
I'm mostly insulated from with an HLL.   But again, that's just me.

The bottome line I guess is that...

Program in assembler to get a feel for the details of the machine, then
if you desire, go to 
an HLL of your choice and continue from there.   And I know that HLL's
are getting better all
the time, and most now produce code almost as compact as assembler.  But
I still like the close
ties I have with the machine using assembler, so that is what I prefer.


	
Regards,

	
Jim


-----Original Message-----
From: piclist-bounces@mit.edu [mailto:piclist-bounces@mit.edu] On Behalf
Of Bob Blick
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 11:45 AM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [PIC] Tutorial site

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:14:02 -0600, "Joe Bento" <joseph@kirtland.com>
said:

> As far as learning a programming language, I've read mixed opinions.
> The only assembler I've done are the example lessons with the PicKit2.
> Some people seem to say to dig right in and learn C and forget 
> assembler.  With exception of some subroutines embedded in C (or JAL 
> is where I've seen it more frequently), is there any advantage to 
> learning assembler first?

I think everyone should learn assembler and write a few programs in it.
The experience you earn is worth it, since you will know firsthand what
it takes at the lowest level.

If you're like most people, after that you'll probably want to use C.
I'd wager that 90 percent or more embedded programmers are most
productive in C. The other 10 percent are smarter than me!

But the experience you get learning assembler will help you forever,
even if it's a different processor architecture. You'll write code that
is more efficient.

You still want to know the instruction set :)

And I frequently find using a little inline assembler here and there
easier than some weird C manipulation that's hard to remember and has to
be verified by looking at the compiler output.

Cheerful regards,

Bob

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