[Joe Johnson]

For all we complain about PBASIC, I don't know any reason why it should not be considered a programming language, albeit a quirky, picky, insanely limited and insanely powerful one.

Most of my problems with PBASIC have to do with the hardware implementation not the lanquage itself.

I have learned to live with 16 bit unsigned math, what kills me more is lack of RAM space for variable (Scratchpad RAM and EEPROM space are poor subsitutes) and the lack of an interrupt mechanism to respond to time critical tasks.

Other than that life would be pretty much the same using anyother language.

Just my two cents.

Joe J.

P.S. I think that the best case scenerio for FIRST would be to hook up with Matlab/Simulink (by MathWorks). You cannot believe how powerful some of the "programming" you can do with Mathlab/Simulink's blocksets. Essentially, they take programming down to moving blocks around and connecting things with arrows (while still allowing all the power of the native hardware AND while generating solid C code).

Many folks (including yours truly) believe that autocoding with systems like Matlab/Simulink will replace hand coding of nearly all embedded programming in the automotive world in about 5 years. You heard it here first ;-)