I think this is the problem with purchasing libraries as object code.

Obviously they want to sell a library that you can use, but they don't want to make it easy to see how it ticks. So they sell you the object as a "black box." This works fine, but it means you have to use the toolset they compiled the library for. And it can be difficult--sometimes impossible--for you to upgrade your toolset until they do. This happened to me at a company I used to work for. We were using decade-old tools because we only had OBJs for that linker version.

I think there would be value in a common OBJ file format being defined for the 8052; this would necesitate some common method in passing parameters to functions, of course. The downside to tool vendors is that users would not be locked into their toolset by the OBJ files. The upside is that they wouldn't be locked into an obsolete version of their toolset, increasing the probability of upgrades.

Craig Steiner