Off Topic: Has CCS Made Their Compiler Too "Smart"

[newguy]

What I mean by that can be seen in the rather new feature(s) added to their #use rs232, such as the buffer option (same goes for the spi_xfer() and others). On the one hand (putting myself in their shoes), I understand how adding features such as this differentiate your product from the competition, but on the other it encourages people to do the bare minimum possible (even less than that actually). In effect, it just gives inexperienced users more proverbial rope with which they can hang themselves.

It seems as though we're getting way more newbies who seem completely disinterested in understanding the fundamentals and/or the reasoning behind the answers they've been provided here on this forum. It just hit me: some of the new features are reminding me more & more of Linux and how that OS takes away the low level control from you. And that really frightens me.

Anyone else feel the same?

[Ttelmah]

I think the wizard is a mistake. Has been for years though. Makes too many things 'easy' to get wrong....

However you can snarl up code just as badly without the extra features.

What I would like to see is more time spent on real 'power' features, rather than 'frills'. For instance on the RS232 buffering, it'd honestly have made more sense and been more adjustable to just make a 'buffer library' which you could include, and give a much enhanced version of ex_sisr etc.. On the power features, libraries to do DMA based operations etc..

Problem is (of course), that 'libraries' are so easily stolen and adapted for other compilers. Hiding things inside #use statements, does make it harder for this to happen, so you can perhaps understand 'why' CCS have elected to go this way.

The nice thing is that lots of things (especially the behaviour for structures, unions, addressmod etc.), has slowly got much better. I find myself remembering how often I had to patch round compiler bugs some years ago, and then looking at how few such problems are seen on recent compilers.

Unfortunately the "don't want to really understand the hardware" learning model, is becoming ever more common, and I can't see CCS changing this, however they built their compiler....

[temtronic]

Well, I'm an 'Old School' guy who actually HAD to READ datasheets and manuals to get things to work 20-30 years ago. I wouldn't trust any 'wizard' as far as I could toss him,especially if he's got a 'simulator' too !
It's probably a 'sign of the times' of more instant features...no thinking required style of 'programming' used these days.
We see a lot of posts from school kids and it's obvious they don't read. I get the feeling 'assembler', instruction sets, etc. are NOT taught or a prerequisite for any 'computer' course these days.
I have no idea how CCS does what they do..too many PICs, too little time, but overall they do a great job.Adding 1,000 employees might just be enough to clean up loose ends.
While I can apprecite the 'bells and whistles', I'm still a 'meat and potatos' guy.
Still have my spiral bound CCS PCM manual here !

Jay