Aztec C

In some cases... my PC/DOS compiler is free (and I've been known to give embedded tools to people with an interesting project). To each his own - I'm very fond of APL which works that way except that it runs right to left. I always wanted to implement the "comes from" operator in one of my tools but never did... Readability of a program is a reflection of the programmer, no matter what the language - good programmers can write very readable code in an unstructured language, while bad programmers will continue to write incomprehensible spagetti no matter how "cutting edge" the tools - Like any art form it flows from the human, not the tool. I've written code for non-8-bit byte machines, and also lots of code which wouldn't like such an environment - In those cases, I know that all likely targets of the code will be byte oriented. It's amazing how often this comes up as an argument that C is non-portable, It's like saying your famly sedan is not a general purpose automobile because it cannot operate on a road with a 3-foot width - yet people drive these cars all over the country (many countries) never knowing how restricted their vehicles are. People write plenty or portable code relying on at least 8-bit bytes every day. I have ported my C compiler to (at least) 12 different processor famlies, ranging from very limited architectures to rather complex and powerful processors - Yet I use the same front end, and 90+% of code written for one processor will compile (and run) without modification on the others. And a very high percentage of that code will compile under other vendors toolsets with minimal to no changes. My C compiler itself, certainly a non- trivial program compiles under itself, and several other vendors toolsets encompasing widely varying architectures with no changes, and not a single line of conditional compilation. Like readbility, portability is a reflection of the programmer, with the caveat that it will be influenced by the requirements. Neither - the answer is "the programmer". Many attempts have been made over the years to develop languages which force the programmer to be "good". But programming is an art, and an art cannot be synthisized. These efforts simply force unnecessary constraints on the real artists, and provide another forum for the bad ones to prove that they produce a mediocre work. How much fuel will you need for the trip? (Kinda hard to answer without parameters isn't it). An AVR1200 with 1K of program storage and NO RAM (only the CPU registers as temp store) is excessive for some tasks - an ARM9 with 1024MEG is limited for others (although I personally can't think of many). I do a lot of my DOS code in 64K "tiny" memory model (ImageDisk for example). But we do digress from Vintage Computing... Dave -- dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com com Collector of vintage computing equipment: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html