William \"Chops\" Westfield wrote:

> On Mar 25, 2010, at 11:49 AM, Walter Banks wrote:
>
> > Arduino may be an important step to moving code generation for
> > embedded systems from abstracting the processor details with C
> > to abstracting application details.
>
> Yes.  Although 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.  And I can't see that really
> catching on in the technical world ("There are 10 kinds of
> people...")  It's also pretty expensive (20 to 50 times slower than
> direct manipulation of constant register bits.)  Though not so
> expensive as an interpreter...

One of the processors we wrote a compiler for only had
pin addressable I/O pins. When I was rewriting some support libraries
I was surprised how much of our thinking is based on traditional
ports with data direction and 8 bits, I was also surprised how many
applications use mostly single bit I/O.

> It's also pretty expensive (20 to 50 times slower than
> direct manipulation of constant register bits

Arduino would optimize quite well for well written compilers
and still keep the abstractions that would make applications
portable.

Regards,

Walter..
--
Walter Banks
Byte Craft Limited
http://www.bytecraft.com











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