[PicForth] Festive code generation bug

[Alex Holden]

easlab at absamail.co.za wrote:
> My projects are always '90% done'  ;-)

I'm up to about 97% now :) Yesterday I found some code which didn't look 
too complicated in the source but actually compiled to about 300 
instructions. I spent an hour rewriting it and managed to reduce it to 
about 100. Along with reducing the help text from a full page of text to 
a three line summary and removing a complicated but non-essential 
feature, I nearly have enough free space to write the last 3%.

> 'Task-handlers & floating point arithmentic' in the context of pics, seem 
> to be getting absurd.   You get superb bicycles, but no bicycle should be 
> 'adapted' to function as a 50 passenger bus.

I would never attempt floating point on a PIC. Fixed point is bad 
enough, and even multi-byte integer arithmetic can be a headache if the 
language you're using doesn't have any built in support for it. I do 
find the basic cooperative multitasker handy though.

> Surely 32 bit ARM is a completely different class to any pic ?
> I guess a 32 bit ARM is not appropriate for a throw-away consumer
> device like a motor-vehicle-combination-lock, which is where the
> pics shine ?

It depends on the application. Yes, with high volume low overhead stuff 
it makes sense to spend a lot of time squeezing it into the cheapest 
processor possible, but with very small volume projects and one-offs it 
can make sense to spend a few quid extra on buying a more powerful 
processor than you need because the extra resources it gives you allow 
you to develop the software quicker and easier. In the past I stayed 
away from ARM because they were generally big chips with external Flash 
etc. which complicates the hardware design, but the Philips LPC2000 
devices are small and have everything on-chip. Of course the downside is 
that you're tempted to use the extra resources to implement lots of 
extra features ;)

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