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From: David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Fri, 13 Sep 2024 17:36:10 +0200
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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.
>