2004 8051 unit sales 1951
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Oh, I'm not arguing it's wrong. What gets old is trying to stretch the LUT over 256 entries. Granted, RETLW is a fun and useful instruction all...
There is more than one C compiler, or at least there has been in the past. Keil may be the only one still in business. However, on this size of CPU not...
Bank issues aside, it's not that bad. It's just different. There's few instructions to learn, their self explanitory, and they work as advertised. PIC 16, at least. PIC 17-18 is bizzare to the point where it's annoying. But I wrote some stuff on the 16F870 at my last job that was not only easy to read, but it worked well and ran well.
Everytime I look at the 8051, I always seem to want to puke.
*ding*! And for a lot of applications, that helps a LOT, esp if board space is an issue.
The stack on the 16 sucks, for sure. Bank issues suck, but they're not the end of the world.
I scanned a few pages on using the binary I-O ports. This poo's easier than a PIC? PIc, you just just set the direction of each port via the TRIS register, then movf or movwf the data from-to the port. or, if you're silly, you do something like:
movf PORTA,f
Yes, you can move the register into itself. This will set the STATUS flags.
That said, my only real big complaint about the 16 series is implementing large lookup tables via the retlw istruction.
it's not perfect, but I'd hardly call the language horrible. For a lot of tiny-small projects, I'd reach for a PIC first.