Vitaliy wrote:
> Although it seems that some of the non-human-friendly
> features of PICs (like banked memory) were not absolutely necessary,

Maybe not necessary, but everything has its tradeoff and priorities.
Banking was a common scheme used by minicomputers of long ago to access more
memory with a small instruction word.  It works, but of course has its
drawbacks too.  Banking is also often the only reasonable compromise to
increase the memory addressing range beyond what a architecture was
originally intended for.

Banking is more widespread than you probably think, although the name
varies.  PICs certainly weren't the first and surely won't be the last to
employ it.  Even the Intel x86 architecture is technically banked (they call
banks "segments" if I remember right).  Banking was definitely a issue on
the original 8088 and 8086.  Over time, Intel grew the bank sizes so that a
whole program could use a single bank and look like it had a linear address
space, but underneath the system was still banked.

Banking is also not that hard to deal with in PICs if you consider this up
front in your coding.  My DBANKIF and related facilities make this a pretty
minor issue.


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