And the C Vs assembler debate continues. How often can this debate be repeated, and repeated, and repeated, ......, ...... only to produce the same result.

Assembler is a more easily understandable form of the machine instructions and can be used by the skilled to produce optimal code for an application.
Large applications written in assembler are often optimised for the application by the creators and often harder to understand by maintainers.

C is a slightly higher level language that requires less knowledge of the target processor but the compiler uses library (stock) implementations to produce code (that may not be optimal) for an application.
Large applications written in C are often easier to understand by maintainers but less
than optimal for the particular application.

Consumer products based on 805x derived systems are most likely embedded and have limited resources so hand/creator optimisations are almost 'de rigueur' to either reduce cost by reducing the required resources (hardware?), or making the best use of the resources avaliable.

[In my experience] A project is often proved to be possible with programmers not necessarily versed in the intricasies of a microprocessor (hey, when setting the accumulator to 0, what Z80 programmer would ever LD A,0 that uses 2 bytes rather than XOR A,A using 1 byte ?). Once the viability of a project is proved hardware costs become VERY, VERY important and optimisations of hardware and software intergration become critical.

So yet again the C/Assembler debate becomes a rather sad for/against argument applied to all projects with resources large and small, rather than a discussion of relative merits for specific projects and their specific resources.

Cheers,

Luccus, [weeping at the repetition of history]