Well, you can doubt. But I assure you that it is true. In fact, I've got 6 binders here full of code that I used (in its entirety) not more than a month ago --- running in a simulator for the old computer it was used on. Those listings are turning out quite useful, as techniques used there are still, to this very day, not being used in modern versions. Exploring that is paying off.
seconds
The point was about preservation in usable form. You change the subject here and are just arguing with yourself in the end.
On a sunny day (Mon, 22 Feb 2010 11:12:14 -0800) it happened Jon Kirwan wrote in :
seconds
No I did not, you chicken out by living in the past with old antique stuff. 'Useable form' should be 'useful form'. I am sure you can walk on your hands from LA to NY backwards too, but it hurts your hands, takes a long time, and serves no other purpose then your ego. And some. I'd take a plane and get it over with. I have experience with very old code. If not in C and portable, simply write better code, takes less time and is more fun. Else you wind up like J.L who still writes 68000 asm and BASIC and has this ego that thinks he is the perfect programmer.
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While, since you write a couple of hundred lines, per project, of
trivial sissy C code for chip programmers and have no real need for
other than monitor output with, possibly, a split screen for the "hard"
parts, you fault those who do _important_ work?
JF
I've sold about $50 million worth of gear using these tools, and it's still going strong. How about you?
We're planning to use an ARM in some future embedded projects, where we need a lot more horsepower and need to run TCP/IP and web pages and stuff. That will be C and an RTOS, most likely... Linux is too heavy and too slow.
My code works well precisely because I'm not a programmer.
--- Just as an aside, while I sometimes disagree with Larkin, I'm 100% in agreement with him on this one since:
Using languages at a level of abstraction higher than asm to generate portable code for embedded systems is silly if you really want to generate the fastest possible bug-free code since portability isn't an issue if you're designing a unique system.
After you write asm for a while it's like you get into the processor's soul and there's no need for an intermediary like C.
BASIC is a wonderful tool for simulating situations and doing "what if's". I use Microsoft's old QB4 and JL uses PowerBasic, but I suspect, in the end, 1+1 still equals 2.
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Yes, but even though it seems to me like my time was wasted, you seem to
think that everyone should stop whatever they're doing and pay homage to
you for the trivialities you've posted.
One can probably do almost as well with plain vanilla C, provided you really understand the compiler and all libraries and do no dynamic allocations. I just don't like C.
Agree. Most of an embedded programmer's time is spent understanding the hardware and defining things, not coding anyhow. But there are some machines that are a PITA to program in assembly; 68K is a joy.
Try PBCC, the PowerBasic Console Compiler. It's great for writing programs that run under Windows, without being "Windows" programs. We did our material control system in PBCC: it looks like this
ftp://jjlarkin.lmi.net/MAX.jpg
which is a "console" which behaves pretty much like the old DOS screen. You still use INPUT, PRINT, LOCATE, stuff like that. The USING$ function is reason enough to use PB, but it has lots of goodies, like TCP stuff built right in; Ethernet is easy.
This pops up a console for 2 seconds, then disappears:
#COMPILE EXE
FUNCTION PBMAIN () AS LONG CLS LOCATE 12, 35 PRINT "Hello, world!" SLEEP 2000
:tOn Sat, 20 Feb 2010 19:34:39 GMT, Jan Panteltje : wrote: : :>On a sunny day (Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:00:50 -0800) it happened John Larkin :> wrote in :>: :>
:>>Epson LQ-2090. This is a wide-carriage, tractor-feed, 500 cps dot :>>matrix. Great for big program listings. Under $500. :>
:>Last time I 'listed' a program was on a Brother portable thermal printer in the :>early eighties. : :Well, that would be a disaster. Thermal paper doesn't :usually last very long. : :But it is surprising you bring up thermal paper as an "early :80's" technology. : :It's still in wide use -- Costco in the US, for example, uses :the damned stuff for their receipts -- after having used dot :matrix in their earlier years. (Something I complain to them :about, almost every year, hoping they will go back.) Dot :matrix in that case worked well and produced receipts that :lasted quite some time. : :>Why would anyone want to print source code, while you can :>have it in a text file and editor? : :Perhaps because one might take it somewhere there isn't a :computer (or where a computer wouldn't be appropriate -- if :you leave a paper listing in the car, no one will care to :break into the car to take it; they might, for a laptop.) : :>And did not dot-matrix belong to the dinosaurs? : :Multi-part forms copy both computer output as well as hand :written notes and signatures, exactly as performed. Though :that's not what John was talking about. : :But they have their place. As in the store receipts :mentioned above.
prezactly so... Have you ever wondered how they print those multi-part airline tickets? Yes, it is done with a dot matrix printer such as the old but now superseded TI/Genicom 895e and their modern equivalents - using a RS232 serial interface what's more.
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I don't either, much...
When I want a variable stored at an absolute address I define I don't
want C to move it where it wants to and then give me a pointer to that
address.
On a sunny day (Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:35:32 -0600) it happened John Fields wrote in :
more fun.
ego that
I concluded that these days you are silently learning to program micros. Thats is good. One level up, where you have a bigger, possibly embedded, system, you need a higher level language that is portable, unless you want to walk on your hands all the time. Especially as the system in question will likely run a real OS, to be specific some version of Unix (say Linux), and you want to use the existing libraries. J. L does not like other's libraries (except his BASIC of course) as they are not written by J. L the perfect programmer, and may contain bugs. For me I find all the libraries available to a C programmer in Linux a true miracle. Sure there are limitations, but then again that is how open source works, you fix the bugs you find, and it gets better all the time.
There is a big learning curve in writing C and using libc, may I recommend reading and using libc.info, it has detailed documentation and examples of all function in libc. Of course in Linux you can also type man some_function anytime, but that assumes you already know about those functions.
So, for a bit more complicated stuff, and many embedded systems connect to a PC with GUI based software, you may need to both write the asm for the specific micro, and the GUI and signal processing in C for on the PC, plus perhaps the Verilog or VHDL for the specific FPGA (also vendor specific). J. L has somebody to the the HDL for him, and some poor guy to do the GUI in Java (? or VB?) for him IIRC. I can do it all three, asm, C, HDL, but do not do Java, as it is dead slow. So there is learning curve. And then *what* will you design? I think both you and me believe in 'bottom up' design, look at the chips, see what they can do, and use that as building block for whatever we can imagine.
Where it goes wrong is the top down approach, where some weird idea or scheme is 'simulated', and then the simulation is sold to a customer, and then it is build, cost overruns, and does not work until rewritten from bottom up :-) Like that luggage handling system in the UK. Or some NASA missions. Plenty of great simulations, but then it crashes as metric system does not use pounds. LOL Have fun.
On a sunny day (Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:56:52 -0600) it happened John Fields wrote in :
You are chicken. I pointed to the simple jppp18 C code to give an example of programming STYLE so J.L could learn from it. But he cannot learn in this state, he wallows in frustration.
Personally I do not really care what you think about my code, or anyone, as it works for me, and was fun to write. That is the important part, nothing else counts. By the thousands of downloads I know that other also have fun with it, and it adds to the global open source pool, that is how Linux came about, and that is how we have a better OS and applications then the commercial money sucking heap of bugs that MS markets.
Do not give up, publish some of the code you are secretly trying on your PICs. hehe
WinZip wouldn't open your tarballs. But it's interesting that you think I'm frustrated, which I'm not - except with Windows - and that you think you have things to teach me.
The portability of C is overrated. Most hard-embedded products never change processor; if they did, the hardware environment would be so different that most of the code would have to be redone, no matter the OS.
libraries.
not written by J. L the perfect programmer,
miracle.
I put whole apps into an eprom and run them on a CPU that has internal RAM. A Linux app needs dram and has to load the OS and app from a
*big* flash or hard drive. And Linux takes hundreds of microseconds to context switch even on a 50-watt fanned+heatsunk Intel processor. That's lethal for most realtime things.
with GUI based software,
signal processing in C for on the PC,
Java (? or VB?) for him IIRC.
I do have other people program FPGAs for me; I just define the logic and interface. My embedded products seldom have GUIs.
VB is a farce.
What do you design? Show us some serious electronics please.
what they can do,
I design and program sort of all over the place. The first ting I actually do is write the manual.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of old women live in 'The Villages'. Quite a few are single and desperate. That retirment community has one of the highest levels of STDS and AIDs in the US.
Why? It was a massive cleanup to clear the roads so power could be restored after multiple hurricanes. What are any of those groups going to do, lay down in front of the continuous string of dump trucks? They would have just run over them and tossed them into the burn pits. There was no other place for them. The massive amount of dead vegetation was a severe fire hazard, and would have filled the landfill past its capacity.
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