Yes, but I'm not a KEIL user, for reasons I've already made clear. I do loosely follow the SDCC user forum, but not KEIL's.

I don't know what you mean by "superb". In arithmetic, it's either absolutely correct, or it's total crap. You can, of course, make approximations, such as the computation of PI or such, as integer computations, and, similarly, you can fiddle with primes in integer format.

Lots of DSP computations have been performed in fixed-point format, including most of what makes telephony work.

Actually, I've had to pore over hundreds of thousands of lines of 'C', Pascal, BASIC, etc, and did most of my work in FORTRAN in college, since they hadn't published 'C' or Pascal yet.

BTW, I was reading through some SPAM late last week and found that current generation PC's costing on the order of $400 come with 8GB of SDRAM and 500GB of HDD. I didn't find that particularly earth shaking. You can find such things on eCost.com. BTW, I don't remember anyone holding back on available technology in an academic setting. Grade schools don't have the latest, but the colleges typically do. After all, what folks use in college is what they buy when they graduate.

RE