Is Picbasic good enough??

[rastan]

Ive been debating this for a while now, and recently ive been trying out a c compiler for pic. I have come to this conclusion: PICBASIC IS EASY!!!!!!

after many hours of struggling to come to terms with a C compiler and after hundreds of errors in programs, i realised that i had just managed to use the serial port. At this point i thought, "picbasic i loads easier than this". you could bang something out on picbasic that works first or second time in a matter of minuites, yet debugging C is a nightmare!

but the question is:

has anyone ever found that picbasic is not good enough for what they are doing?? if so, in what cases?

because people that dont use basic say that its very simple and cannot handle complicated code, hence basic, but in my eyes, it is soooooo much easier.

comments appreciated.

cheers,

phil

[toalan]

I agree Picbasic is easy, because it has support for most of the features, ADCIN,HPWM,Hserout etccc. With C you basically have to configure the registers yourself to access the hardare features. If you are not accessing the special hardware on the pic and just want to use the pic to crunch numbers then C is great.

I have problems with basic being too slow for my application, so I had to change my approach to get reasonable results. It has kind of been a blessing in disguise because now my approach is much much cleaner and requires less extra circuits. It is kind of tough to get used to picbasic being pretty slow, because in normal programming on the PC, I am so used to the hardware being so much faster than required. But sometimes an extra challenge is good and makes you think outside the box, I do not even recal the last time I needed to optimize my code to run faster on a PC.

[nomada]

I have to agree with TOALAN!
Most of the time we get in troubles just because we forget to think in terms of hardware/software relation.
Probably we forget sometimes that each designs may need a different aproach.
YES, PBP looks easy, it has good features built in, the support is very good, comparing with similar software I will give it an 8 (in a 0 to 10 scale - giving it a 10, probably Melabs would stop improvements)

[mister_e]

Everything is in the coding style... using internal registers or few lines of code instead of some statements like pre-made ADCIN,BUTTON, HPWM and many other helps really... just be friends with Datasheets... everything is in.

[toalan]

there is a big problem with mixing assembly with PBP, many times when we use PBP we have no idea which registers PBP changes so when you do assembly that uses those registers things go wacky. For example if you use HPWM and want to use TMR2 for a counter driven interrupt things can screw up.

[Melanie]

If you read the DATASHEET you will discover that the PIC requires use of TMR2 for timing PWM functions. If you used Assembler with Hardware PWM you would still need to use TMR2 - there's no escaping it. There are no secrets regarding what PBP does or doesn't do to registers behind the scenes - it's all in the DATASHEET if only people bothered to look at them for anything more than the pinout diagram.