On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:24 AM, William "Chops" Westfield wrote: > > On Jul 26, 2011, at 12:07 AM, Wouter van Ooijen wrote: > >> you look at the problem as 'how can we raise efficient PIC assembler >> programmers'. That is not how the school sees it. They see assembler >> programming as something the students should have done once, but are >> not likely to do ever again. I kind of agree with the above. Most of our firmware engineers program in C. Even though some of the old programs are using assembly (eg: 80186 and Z180) but the redesigns will change them to 32bit MCUs and use C. Actually most of the old programs were using C anyway (8051, H8, etc), only a few odd programs were written in assembly. > Arguably, students will get more out of learning two assemblers > slightly than becoming experts at one. =A0(The assembler class I took > did IBM360 and PDP11. ~30 years ago.) I learned three assembly class in the university days, Z80/8051 and then x86 (8086). I think I forgot almost all of them. I learned PIC asm by myself at work in 2000 and has done two projects with them for 8-pin PICs (4 assembly programs) at work. The first one was a real one back in 2005, the 2nd one was not a real project of mine but rather to help a colleague to modify a small program. None of our firmware engineers are familiar with PIC enough so I volunteered to help early this year. On the other hand, learning the assembly helps me to understand the MCUs, but that does not mean I am a competent programmer, I have not done a proper PIC program fully by my own which is more than 4KB... > A 16F PIC is perhaps a good example of a rather "oddball" > architecture, except that the obvious "mainstream" assembler would be > x86, which is (1) REALLY complex, (2) hardly ever used even in the > real world, and (3) is pretty much as oddball as a PIC (aside from the > many varieties of x86.) =A0MSP430 or one of the Freescale architectures > might be a good second choice... Are schools still teaching x86 assembly? I think most of them will teach 8051, 68HCxx, MIPS, or things like PIC and ARM. > Don't forget that it's a very rare "programming" class that actually > produces competent programmers. =A0If a student graduates from most > universities as a good programmer, that'll be because of projects and > assignments beyond the "intro" classes, personal-time hacking (and/or > employment), and/or innate talent. That is probably true. --=20 Xiaofan --=20 http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist .