Quote:
Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery
You're aware that RSLogix5000 can use other programming methods, including structured text, right? And I'm curious as to why you'd want FIRST to keep a software package used frequently in industry away from teams, especially if your basis is simply because it uses ladder logic. It's not as if function block programming, as many teams use in LabView, is any better.
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For all but the simplest tasks, ladder logic is pretty convincingly inferior to other types of programming that are possible on modern PLCs or computers running RTOSs; even for the simplest tasks, it's
not universally better. I was going by Chris Elston's post referring to the fact that ladder logic is used on this hardware. If it does support other things, then that's excellent. If the behaviour of the hardware is identical using various programming methods, then that's even better. (So that implementing something in ladder logic wouldn't be necessary to achieving results equivalent to the competition setup. I doubt this is true, though, because most compilers for functional languages optimize automatically, which I have not known to be true for ladder logic—probably by design. Without having seen the application, I don't know if these differences will matter in the slightest.)
Incidentally, being frequently used in industry is not a sufficient reason to encourage teams to try something. Industry does lots of inefficient, uneconomical or otherwise illogical things because it has constraints that don't apply to teams or students learning engineering methods. Furthermore, assuming a finite amount of time to learn industrial techniques, it's not necessarily a good idea to split efforts between platforms.