Purpose of the _SIMULATOR macro?

[lasindi]

What is the purpose of the _SIMULATOR macro in this segment of code from main() in the default code? From what I can tell, all it does is prevent anything from happening inside the while loop, which would be rather useless. So, why is it there?

[Mark McLeod]

MPLAB has a simulator built in that allows you to run or step through your code as it executes without the RC. The _SIMULATOR tells the compiler to skip over portions of the code that would normally be supplied by the RC but impede the simulation. Specifically, the section of code that waits for radio packets to arrive.

Try a search on _SIMULATOR to find other discussions about MPLABs simulator.