It's already been stated many times by persons much more familiar than I, that, if you can't program it in ASM, you can't program it. as fast, and as well

I have seen '51 code done by people, to whom 'assembler' is a city in Russia, which worked. You CAN, actually get the important stuff understanding the chip without knowing one line of assembler.

Will that be a more difficult route. certainly. Will there be shortcomings? - certainly. Is it impossible? certainly not.

NOW, with the above said, I would NEVER recommend anyone skipping the step of familiarizing with/learning assembler before venturing into programming the '51.

So, where you say "do it in assembler" I say, "get what you have working" and also state "if you do not know assembler learn it". I am opposed to 'curing' problems with changing language, if you can not make what you have work, it will not help to change the language, the issues (ignorance of the hardware) are the same.

where is the difference in understanding the hardware in these two approached?

sbit clkbit = 0xa0;

mov dph,pointer
mov dpl,pointer+1
movx a,@dptr
inc dptr
mov P1,a
setb clkbit
clr clkbit

P1 = *pointer;
pointer++;
clkbit = 1;
clkbit = 0;

Erik