Oooh, that's when I got into PICs, and was fascinated by some of the=20
highly optimized math routines done in assembly.  I was an assembly=20
fanatic since my TRS-80 days.  It was great trying to decipher some of=20
the math routines on the piclist website and come up with some elegant=20
way to do other things, but I also learned that sometimes brute force is=20
the best way.

I have since morphed my PIC dabbling to commercial usage, and have,=20
after much agonizing, been learning to go with faster development using=20
C, rather than getting academic about some tasks.  It still bugs me to=20
waste horsepower, but getting additional horsepower for quicker=20
development that may be less optimized is certainly more viable as it=20
costs very little more.  I do still have a couple projects that are=20
assembly based, especially the ones where timing is critical, but those=20
are low-volume and does not warrant porting to C.  Those are 16F's with=20
MPLAB 8.xx and assembly.  Most all else has been ported to C with 18F's=20
nowadays, and I've started using PIC32's with C in MPLABX.

But yes, I miss assembly.

Cheers,
-Neil.




On 8/22/2016 2:23 PM, Bob LeDoux wrote:
> Back in days of yore there were people with names like Nixon, Datallo, My=
ke creating elegant routines to perform difficult tasks with 8-bit PIC's in=
 assembler.
>
> I don't depend on system development for my income.  So I still enjoy pro=
jects for the challenge.  For example, I developed a version of Conway's Ga=
me of Life using a 64 x 128 graphic LCD powered by a 16F88--programmed in a=
ssembler.
>
> I wonder, am I the only person left using a PicKit2, with MPLAB IDE 8.xx,=
 assembler programming 12F and 16F chips?   My chips only have 2 or 3 numbe=
rs following the "F"?
>
> Am I the only person who sometimes uses absolute code and prefers to Quic=
kbuild my programs rather than build a project?
>
> Those were the characteristics that encouraged beginners to move to PIC's=
 after playing with the Parallax Basic Stamp. With linked files and project=
s, those days are gone. Systems like the Arduino mean programmers are slow =
to grasp processors at the machine level.
>
> By the way, I used this question as an excuse to post with a topic identi=
fier [PIC].  I haven't seen many of those lately on the [PIC] list.
>

--=20
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