BASIC-like Interpreter for Arduino

Using Arduino Networking, Protocols, and Devices
17

OZ_Willy:
No offence intended, but I think the two moderators are being a little hypocritical here.
Was not the whole Arduino platform for which this forum is based on, built to SIMPLIFY the coding of AVR's?

I don't believe I am being hypocritical. I think the whole IDE does an absolutely great job of simplifying coding for AVRs. With an easy-to-use interface you can be programming without Make files, complex linking, and needing to know a lot of detail.

Let me tell you a story ...

A little while back (couple of years) I had a PICAXE board. That used Basic rather than C. It was even simpler than C, right?

My son and I got some blinking lights going. Fine. So far so good. It went something like this (from here ).

 do
	high B.1	; switch on output B.1
	pause 1000	; wait 1 second
	low B.1		; switch off output B.1
	pause 1000	; wait 1 second
   loop			; loop back to start

Now the equivalent code on the Arduino is:

void setup ()
  {
  pinMode (1, OUTPUT);
  }  // end of setup
void loop ()
  {
  digitalWrite (1, HIGH);
  delay (1000);
  digitalWrite (1, LOW);
  delay (1000);
  }  // end of loop

I seriously don't think that is much more complicated.

But anyway, back to the story ... Then we wanted to make a "morse code" player. We wanted to make some subroutines (that you called with "gosub") to play the beeps for each letter. Then we hit a snag.

We made a subroutine to play a dot. And one to play a dash. And then one for each letter (eg. gosub dot, gosub dash, gosub dot, etc.)

There is a limit on PICAXE of the total number of gosubs you can have in a program.

In the case of our part (the PICAXE 08M) it was:

All 'M' parts (obsolete) number:15 1 nested:4

That is, you could have a maximum of 15 gosub statements in the entire program! Whether or not they were nested (if you nest them you can only nest 4 deep).

That's a pretty amazing limitation. It means you can use them for blinking lights and doing simple stuff, but when you want to do something semi-serious you can't - not easily. So, suddenly it is more complex. Because you are working around limitations in the "simpler" system.