Something wrong with PBP?

[Heckler]

A friend of mine, who is a computer programmer, told me one time that the assembly language is something trivial. Does anybody else agree with this point of view?

Depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is.
sorry... I digress.

Assembly is, I believe, the lowest level of language that can be used to program a PIC. In order to code in assembly one must have an intimate working knowledge of the inner workings of the PIC. Must know about the various registers, the stack, addressing, flags, memory banks, etc, etc.

If you are good at assembly your code will be the most compact (fewest number of bytes). PICbasic for example makes writing and understanding a program MUCH easier, BUT at the expense of compactness. It is considered a Higher Level Language.

I am not a "C" programer, but I believe, it is somewhat closer to assembly than Basic.

If your friend meant by "trivial" that it is easy and there is "nothing to it" then I do not agree... but that is probably because I am not familiar with the inner workings of the PIC micro. If he meant that it is the most basic form of language that one can code in... he/she was probably correct.

If you look through a PIC data sheet there are numerous examples of coding in assembly... for example in the 16F690 datasheet here is how to initialize PORTA

BCF STATUS,RP0 ;Bank 0
BCF STATUS,RP1 ;
CLRF PORTA ;Init PORTA
BSF STATUS,RP1 ;Bank 2
CLRF ANSEL ;digital I/O
BSF STATUS,RP0 ;Bank 1
BCF STATUS,RP1 ;
MOVLW 0Ch ;Set RA<3:2> as inputs
MOVWF TRISA ;and set RA<5:4,1:0>
;as outputs
BCF STATUS,RP0 ;Bank 0

I would prefer to work at a higher level and not have to worry about the finer details of the inner "guts" of the PIC.

Sometimes, though, the only way to get a job done is to use assembly. Especially when TIME/SPEED is critical.

my .02

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@ Mike,K8LH
If you are hoping to learn about assembly by reading the PICbasic manual... I do not think you will find much. It details how to use the BASIC language (specifically PICbasic written by MELabs) since there are several versions of BASIC one must pay close attention to syntax and command structure for the version of BASIC they are using. If you were using PROTON BASIC... the PICbasic manual would do you no good. (except for general learning and comparison)

I often look over on the Parallax Basic Stamp forum for coding examples as PICbasic and the basic stamp are quite similar.

I am not sure where to go to learn about assembly... I do know there are some VERY GOOD assembly programers that hang around here that might be able to steer you.

[Mike, K8LH]

Thanks for the additional info' Dwight. FYI, I'm a reasonably accomplished assembly language programmer and I also use C. I also enjoyed using the free/lite version of the Swordfish BASIC compiler a couple years ago.

I agree that high level languages are faster, more readable, and more intuitive when compared to assembly language and I often include C code comments in my assembly language programs to help convey concepts.

Regards, Mike

[rsocor01]

If your friend meant by "trivial" that it is easy and there is "nothing to it" then I do not agree... but that is probably because I am not familiar with the inner workings of the PIC micro. If he meant that it is the most basic form of language that one can code in... he/she was probably correct.

I can only guess what he meant by "trivial". But, remember I said he is a computer programmer, so he was referring to assembly language for computers. I think that he meant that assembly was "trivial" or "of no importance" to him since he can do with computers anything he wants with higher level languages like C and Java. I thought that the same could be said about PICs.

Robert