1 Introduction

Question 1

Advantages of Assembly?

Answer 1

• Translated by an assembler directly in processor op-codes
• Incredibly powerful, it does exactly what we tell it to

Question 2

Disadvantages of Assembley?

Answer 2

• It can be very hard for a human to read
• This can make it very hard to debug and fix
• It is processor specific, you have to rewrite it for another PIC

Question 3

Why and How do we need high level programming languages?

Answer 3

• Humans describe ideas using abstract high level concepts (i.e solve this function)
• Computers don’t understand these concepts, so we need to have some form of intermediary
• This problem was solved by creating new languages
• These languages are understandable to humans but can still be translated into op-codes

Question 4

How is MATLAB run on a computer?

Answer 4

• In order to generate op-codes from MATLAB we need a translator
• The translator takes our high level code and translates it into specific op-codes
• There is a one-to-many mapping, typically each line of MATLAB will require more than one op-code

Question 5

Why and how do we need a compiler?

Answer 5

• Sooner or later this process gets very complicated, and there may often be more than one “answer” to the translation
• The translation of large programs is performed using a tool called a compiler
• Compilers are tools that perform translation, optimisation, syntax translation and semantic analysis
• Compilers can be notoriously complicated but they all perform the same job – translating our code into op-codes

Question 6

Levels of programming?

Answer 6

Levels of programming?

Question 7

C origins?

Answer 7

• General purpose computer programming language
• Invented in 1972 at Bell labs USA

Question 8

Advantages of C?

Answer 8

• C is fast, flexible and provides good access to hardware, it works well on microprocessors
• C programs are easily portable between different microprocessors
• Linux, Windows and Mac OS – These are all coded in C
• Lots of support both online and in books
• Lots of code examples and libraries
• Considered to be the gold standard

Question 9

Disadvantages of C?

Answer 9

Not necessarily the most compact representation

There are almost no sanity checks, it will let you do silly things

It is possible to write some very cryptic code in C

Not everything is portable, for example porting some interfacing code from a PIC to an Arduino would require some changes