Hi Richard,

Thanks for your lengthy and thoughtful response. I personally don't agree with many of your opinions, but since that's all they are, that's fine. You wouldn't agree with some of mine, and that's also okay.

I am left with questions on one point, though. A couple of things you said here seem completely at odds with your recent and repeated statements such as this one, "HLL's belong in schools, perhaps, but not in serious MCU work," where you seem to be advocating assembly language as the only reasonable choice for programming a microcontroller.

The first was this:


Certainly assembly language offers far less type checking and far less "help" than even C does. So I wonder, what are these "other tools" that you're talking about that apparently do?

The other was this:


In my book, assembly language is ultimately flexible; it lets you do absolutely anything, after all. So if, as you've opined, the flexibility of C somehow "discourages rigor and discipline", how is it that the increased flexibility of assembly language doesn't discourage rigor and discipline even more?

Thanks,

-- Russ