> Even a very high level language like C is a bad idea on something so constrained, because C assumes that everything is a massive approximately VAX-like architecture with mappable memory all over the place, and limitless amounts of it, possibly as much as one or two megabytes.
That's not really true for the AVR family; the instruction set and general architecture was designed with C in mind. Unlike say a PIC microcontroller, the AVR family has a hardware stack pointer (SPH/SPL) and a large number of 8-bit registers which can also be referenced in 16-bit pairs for the (albeit limited) set of instructions which support it.
C makes some assumptions (for instance assuming the existence of a stack pointer), but the AVR designers kept that stuff in mind. Pretty sure AVR C actually uses ILP16 data model, not an 8-bit model as you may be expecting.
C doesn't make assumptions about the size of an address space, although you can when specifying the data model for your architecture.
The only thing that's slightly less than clean programming AVRs using C is that they're Harvard architecture instead of Von Neumann so you have to access program memory via special instructions (lpm/elpm/spm). That's wrapped with a __attribute__((progmem)) specifier in AVR GCC so the compiler knows it uses a different address space.
That's not really true for the AVR family; the instruction set and general architecture was designed with C in mind. Unlike say a PIC microcontroller, the AVR family has a hardware stack pointer (SPH/SPL) and a large number of 8-bit registers which can also be referenced in 16-bit pairs for the (albeit limited) set of instructions which support it.
C makes some assumptions (for instance assuming the existence of a stack pointer), but the AVR designers kept that stuff in mind. Pretty sure AVR C actually uses ILP16 data model, not an 8-bit model as you may be expecting.
C doesn't make assumptions about the size of an address space, although you can when specifying the data model for your architecture.
The only thing that's slightly less than clean programming AVRs using C is that they're Harvard architecture instead of Von Neumann so you have to access program memory via special instructions (lpm/elpm/spm). That's wrapped with a __attribute__((progmem)) specifier in AVR GCC so the compiler knows it uses a different address space.