Lpc2000

Hi Stephen,

I'm honestly not wishing to be rude -*please* don't take offence, but I 
just don't see anything that gives you any advantage over running an OCD 
with a JTAG type interface and writing in C. I am not saying there isn't 
one, but the explanation below means nothing to me. This is exactly the 
sort of stuff the chaps at PAC would say and when I asked them why that 
was good they'd just shrug and say because it helps you develop faster! 
They couldn't explain why what you have said below is faster than 
assembler/C with an emulator/OCD.

I understand that Forth is the monitor program, but statements like: 
"The importance of interactive debugging is hard to understand until you 
have experienced it," just remind me of PAC and my impression that 
because they couldn't explain *why* it was so good and how it worked, 
they didn't really understand exactly what they were doing. (Again, I am 
*not* saying there is no advantage, just that statements like that 
completely fail to convince me!)

Also, it does nothing to convince me Forth is better (a claim I heard 
over and over) that the method of writing code I'd been brought up with.

Why does this:

"Forth gives you interactive debugging on the target with *every*
function ("word" in Forth parlance) visible to you."

Give you any more than a compiler/debugger/emulator type method?

Cheers,

Rob (Genuinely interested in why Forth chaps are so evangelical about 
their stuff! :-)

--------------------------------------------------------

Forth gives you interactive debugging on the target with *every*
function ("word" in Forth parlance) visible to you. This means
that you can do bottom-up testing. Feeding test scripts for
execution on the target is usually trivial using a professional-
grade Forth system.

Forth *is* the monitor you mention. The importance of
interactive debugging is hard to understand until you have
experienced it, especially when commissioning equipment.

The interactivity can be provided by the target itself, or by an
umbilical link to a host PC application. Modern Forth systems
generate code using compilation techniques like those used in C
and other compilers, so there is no loss of performance.

Although we make ARM JTAG debuggers, we use them mostly for
hardware bring-up and production programming. Once the Forth
system is running, it's faster to debug the system using the
Forth console.