I agree with Tom completely. I have Keil's tools and when I code in C51 I find that the code produced by the compiler looks much the same as it would have in assembler. In fact there have been a couple of occasions that I was working on an 8051 project in assembler but wanted to add some complicated code with a bunch of messy logic in it. One example was exceedingly nice to express the messy logic in C, so I wrote it in C, compiled to a machine source format and then extracted that to my assembly language source where I edited it a small amount and added comments. It gave a good result that would have taken 4x or 5x longer to write in assembler from scratch!!

Michael Karas