I have to agree, once you know the tools as well as you know KEIL's, I expect, since you know what the compiler will produce under a given set of circumstances, it serves as well as writing in a macro-assembler, particularly since you know when you should do exactly that.

HLL's do some nice things for the feeble-minded, and for the rest of us, too, in that they remember the rules of scope, and such things when we don't.

The unfortunate thing is that many people think that learning the elementary syntax for 'C' qualifies them as a programmer, when many of them haven't even got the discipline to make a decent "do do" list. The result is that they have multiple functions that do essentially the same things, yet don't share the space those common operations occupy. If a "programmer's" (using the term loosely) pay were cut in half for every byte that could be removed from his object code and for every line of comment that could be relevantly and usefully added, I'd be all for HLL's in MCU's.

If you wonder about those "introduced bugs" just follow the discussions/mailing lists associated with various compilers. Keep in mind, though, that I consider a bug to be any deviation, no matter how slight, from the documentation. If there's no documentation, then the entire project is a bug. (Documentation should be complete and final, and 1000 copies in the publisher's warehouse, before the first byte is coded ... well ... maybe that's a bit extreme, but the "programmers" shouldn't be allowed to compromise the product's features or quality.)

RE