On Sep 9, 2008, at 6:10 AM, Xiaofan Chen wrote:

>> Learning C on a PIC may be somewhat hard but I intend to conquer it  
>> and
>> I will - one just has to be very stubborn and not let it bet ya.
>
> to start with any PICs, you need to understand the
> datasheets. To understand the datasheet, you need to know
> a bit of assembly. And you need the hardware as well.

Hmm.  On the CPUs where it's not intended for you to ever program in  
anything but C, the datasheets talk C, and the manufacturer probably  
supplies a STANDARD C library for manipulating the hardware.  And the  
datasheets pretty much SUCK for describing how the HW works at the bit  
level.

I first ran into this on the Luminary Micro Cortex M3 CPUs; they  
provide a very complete C library for doing things, and thats  
apparently how they expected you to do things, because the datasheet  
sure didn't describe anything well enough to write your own assembly  
from scratch.  I found it very frustrating, actually...

So the problem with programming a PIC in C is that there isn't any  
STANDARD C library for manipulating the hardware (and it doesn't help  
that there's SO many different HW variants.)  Each compiler has some  
libraries, but they're at different levels of functionality...

BillW

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