[PicForth] Festive code generation bug

[Jamie Lawson]

On Sun, 26 Dec 2004, Alex Holden wrote:

> 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.

I am assuming you mean the jump in version number from 0.32 to 1.0 is
misleading and not the actual 1.0 number.

While I certainly appreciate what you are saying; and the bugs
can be quite elusive at times, in general I find PicForth quite usable.
Being very close to the hardware yet still providing some higher level
structure (loops, if-then etc).

However, I do have the luxury of only needing to build one-offs and
prototypes. I do not develop commercial applications (not even indirectly)
and have no real experience in this area. When I hit a problem in PicForth
code generation I tend to revert to assembler and code around it.

I find PicForth can be quite handy even on the smaller PICs, like the
16x84, for quick implementations if you keep an eye on your resources (this
is for home projects retrofits which tend to use leftover chips). Speaking
of which; many thanks to David McNab for the dmap word :)

> 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).

This is a very good point. For work I too have started to move away from
PICS;  specifically to the above mentioned TI MSP430 series (very nice).
Currently, the only benefits to me for using a PIC over a MPS430 is PICs
still provide 5 volt operation and DIP packaging (and probably pricing,
but I never buy in quantity). I have used the Atmel AVRs for a couple of
projects but they just don't seem to grab me (but at least there is gcc
support).

Regards,
Jamie Lawson