John Youngquist wrote:
Interesting response.
I routinely implement large systems on the 8051 chip in assembly language
which I can write faster than Pascal. Assembly is a minimum of 500%
faster than
C on the 8051. I hate C anyway.
The machine is a pick & place machine designed to assemble SMT
circuit boards. It was originally controlled by a Borland Basic
program written in
Japan without any useful comments. With 5 or 6 statements per line
without even
a single space it looked like Japanese to me. Initially I needed to
fix a few bugs
and add a few features so I studied the code for while - all 100K
statements of it.
I decided rewriting it from scratch would be faster that figuring it
out. In exactly 2 weeks
I had replicated and enhanced the original functionality with 3K lines
of Pascal. I still
had to study the code to figure out how drive their special hardware,
but over the years
all of it has been replaced with simpler stuff. Numerous enhancements
have
swelled the code to 8K lines using less than 2 64K blocks of memory.
The before/after size ratio shows how poorly the basic was done.
As implemented in BP it works very well. The multi-tasking part handles
functions that are not time critical, operating air cylinders that
don't know what a mSec
is. The fast motion is handled independently by Animatics Smart motors.
I have never explored the multimedia timers. I drive the LPT int to
get my own periodic
interrupt because the multi-task code already uses the timer. As you
know there are 3
timers in the timer chip but only one will generate an interrupt.
One problem I have yet to solve is the BP IDE when it hits a
breakpoint kills my LPT interrupt.
Nothing but an IDE restart will restore it. It sure cramps your
debugging style.
You may think
http://www.freedos.org/
in a simple PC with Free Pascal
http://www.freedos.org/cgi-bin/lsm.cgi?mode=dir&dir=devel
I think , you may directly use your Pascal program in DOS mode : Port
I/O , Interrupts , etc.
Thank you very much .
Mehmet Erol Sanliturk
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