BCC Iain: You get 'mentioned in despatches' below.

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> Yes. =A0Although I suspect that Arduino's biggest departure from "normal
> programming techniques" is in abstracting away the whole concept of
> "ports and registers and bits" into mere "pins", so that would-be
> users don't have to understand binary. =A0And I can't see that really
> catching on in the technical world ("There are 10 kinds of
> people...") =A0It's also pretty expensive (20 to 50 times slower than
> direct manipulation of constant register bits.) =A0Though not so
> expensive as an interpreter...


Some years ago my son started a BSc in Computer Science.
Within weeks he was writing code that did complex things via the
internet, manipulating data bases and getting a good grasp of the high
level things that could be achieved. I asked him questions. They were
teaching him nothing about what lay underneath. Awareness of hardware
was almost non existent. A higher level approach would have been hard
to achieve. The things he could do with what he was learning were
powerful and impressive but he had no knowledge or understanding of
how it worked or what lay underneath. I was seriously appalled.
THEN they started to drill down. It got amazingly real rather quickly.
Once he knew what he could achieve and what a powerful toolset he had
and how "easy" it was once you knew 'what', they taught him why and
how. I was seriously impressed.

For some at least, the Arduino may well achieve the same result - or
may be used to this effect by those who choose to use it that way.



                   Russell

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