[PicForth] Festive code generation bug

[Alex Holden]

David McNab wrote:
> I've seen similar myself, but my patience kinda ran out.
> PicForth is truly a gem, but alas its flaws can be subtle, deadly and 
> unpredictable,

I have to say I feel the same way. When Picforth version 1.0 was 
released I (wrongly) thought that meant it was fairly bug-free, and 
decided to try it out on a quite large project, thinking it would 
probably be quicker than writing it in assembly as I usually do. But 
tracking down PicForth bugs has taken me so long that I'm sure I would 
have finished well before now if I'd used assembly. But I've got so far 
(about 90% done, although I've run out of flash space and am having to 
go back and rewrite stuff to make it smaller) that I'm stuck with 
PicForth for a bit longer just to get this project done.

I'm not saying that PicForth isn't an impressive achievement given the 
limitations of the PIC architecture, but I do think that the 1.0 version 
number was premature and misleading.

As an aside, in this case the hardware was already built around a 
PIC16F876, but I've recently decided that in the future I'm going to be 
moving away from PICs altogether except for very small projects (12C509 
type stuff). There are better architectures available now such as Texas 
Instruments' 16 bit RISC MSP430 series, or for a few dollars more you 
can even get a 60Mhz 32 bit ARM with lots of flash and RAM (Philips' 
LPC2000 series), both of which are well supported by gcc and several 
third party commercial compilers (including MPE and SwiftX).

-- 
------------ Alex Holden - http://www.linuxhacker.org ------------
If it doesn't work, you're not hitting it with a big enough hammer