PIC if for hardware types that want to dabble in firmware without having to learn much. Like VB for micros. ;-) Mind you, the low end AVR's suck too. I've used them both and HATE the PICs. The first thing you want to do is create macros to do things you take for granted with a better CPU. And of course that's stupid, because we should be using C.

With all the silicon that is commited to I/O and peripherals these days, you'd think that a decent CPU would be a given. Freescale are following the cheap crap game too with the RS08. The CPU should have a handful of 8, 16 and maybe even 32 bit registers. I don't need a huge register file, that's what ram is for. A decent stack architecture (which the 8051 does not), should allow for addressing into the stack for proper local variable usage (in C or assembler), etc... You shouldn't need to use a retarded Index command or equivalent to access data stored in code space. Give me real pointers, preferably at least one for each memory type -- rom, ram, stack. And push return addresses onto the stack, not a 2-level return address array. Ugh.

GB