FotS

Great Cow Basic (GCB) is a high level language that has sufficient flexibility to provide BASIC code portability between many of the small to mid-range PIC devices, outputting Assembler or HEX for burning direct to the PIC of your choice.

While not as powerful as some BASICs (notably MMBasic), It has simple string and math functions (and even fixed-point on larger PICs) which take away a lot of the pain of assembler while largely maintaining its speed. Nothing beats good hand-cranked assembler for speed and compactness, nothing beats a rich high-level language for completeness. Compiled languages rest somewhere in the middle.

You need to be aware of certain constraints and to surrender some of the finer control over bank switching etc, but it greatly reduces the time of development at the expense of slightly less compact code - typical of compilers. A nice touch is you can put assembler inline in your code to handle stuff that needs the speed. I often write programs largely in assembler with GCB providing a nice “container” for all the nasty string stuff - is that cheating?

GCB scores over some of its rivals in that it provides inbuilt support for the ENC28J60 Ethernet module giving medium size PICs Ethernet capability (wow! - although I haven't played yet) That has to be worth a look if you write assembler from scratch.

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