Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On 11/09/2024 21:06, David Schultz wrote:

On 9/11/24 4:40 AM, David Brown wrote:

The other reason, of course, was the name - "PIC" is associated with brain-dead microcontrollers with terrible C tools and which many people program in assembly.  They are also renowned for being very solid, coming in relatively amateur-friendly packages, and for never going out of production.

 After having written code for a PIC I agree with "brain-dead". The small sized memory pages were bad enough but the total lack of an add with carry instruction drove me mad.
 

If you pretend it is a sort of microcode rather than assembly, so that you need several PIC assembly instructions to do the work of a single assembly instruction on a "normal" 8-bit CISC microcontroller, it feels less bad.  And with enough complicated macros, it is possible to keep paging a bit more under control and automated.
It also helps to use macros to give instructions better names - such as "IfBit" and "IfNBit" rather than "btfsc" and "btfss".  (The fact that I can remember these after 25 years or so is a sign of the amount of cognitive effort it took to work with these things!)

So I swore them off and the introduction of a MIPS based system did nothing to change that.