[PicForth] pre-announcing Forth for PIC18F chips

[Mark J. Dulcey]

> Ditto across the 18F range, AFAIK. Makes me wonder why people still put 
> up with PIC16F chips, when pin-compatible 18F chips are only pennies 
> more expensive.

First, some applications (especially consumer electronics) actually are 
sensitive to those pennies. If you're going to make a million units of 
something, it may be worth some extra development time to shave 10 cents 
off the unit cost of each one.

Second, if you are using a mixture of large (28 pin and larger) and 
small (18 pin and smaller) PICs in an application, being able to use the 
same code base in all of them might have advantages. Now that the 
18F1220 and 18F1320 are available, the 18F has moved down into the 
18-pin world (though there the cost difference is over $1 per chip -- 
compare the prices of the 18F1220 and the 16F628A), but there is still 
no 18F series chip in any smaller package.

Finally, the disadvantages of the 16F instruction set aren't as serious 
for small programs, where you don't have to deal with the horrible 
paging stuff.