Project Background
Historical
This
is V1 of a Pascal-AVR subset compiler for control applications which has been
undergoing development, on and off, for the last two years.
The
original intention was to ease the pain for (general) engineering students who
were meeting with AVR micro controllers for the first time and finding assembly
language rather difficult to grasp in the very limited time available.
However,
since it is just possible that others might be interested enough to want to try
it out, I am making it available (as-is with no guarantees whatsoever as to its
suitability for any purpose) in case this might be so.
Release status
PascalAVR
has been developed using Delphi V1 in a (largely) Win95 environment. It seems
to work also under WinME and WinNT, although I haven’t had the opportunity to
carry out extensive testing in these environments. I should be interested to
know if other users confirm my findings, or if there are problems that I am
unaware of. Additionally, most of the
testing has been done with the AT90S2313 as the target, so there might be some
problems if other devices in the classic AVR family are used instead (hopefully
not).
Please
regard this as a beta-test version for the time being. My intention is to release this package as
freeware, partly to make a contribution as one that has benefited from so many
first-rate public domain and freeware programs in the past, and partly to add a
little to the choice of languages available to the AVR programmer.
However,
please note that this package is not released into the public domain (yet) and
I retain copyright to those portions of the package written by myself.
Future development
This
project is not at an end; please feel free to evaluate the program and let me
know of any faults that you find. I cannot guarantee to be able to find time to
fix them, although I will do my best to remedy matters in later releases, when
and if they appear!
If
you devise any library modules, which you think might be of general interest or
use within an AVR project, do let me know. If I can, and you are agreeable, I
will try to include them in any further releases of the package. It would be
nice if you could adopt the same general style that I have tried to use so far,
for the sake of consistency. (It is a style strongly influenced by that used in
the code produced by many first-rate assembly language programmers in the days
of CP/M-80 and the Z-system – remember them?)
Finally…
Please
note that I am not a professional programmer (I work in Hydrometry) and can
only make progress with development when time permits. I hope you have few
problems with the package, and get as much enjoyment from using it to develop
small-scale AVR projects as I have.
Clive
Graham mailto:pascalavr@grahamfamily.eclipse.co.uk