[TriEmbed] Arduino Releases Its WiFi-Enabled RP2040 Board | Tom's Hardware (& structured assembler)

[Pete Soper]

For those wanting to have a full collection of PR2040 boards, here's the 
Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect 
<https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arduino-nano-rp2040-released> with 
WIFI and Bluetooth from the Arduino folks. Tom's sez complete IDE 
support from Arduino with old and new regular IDE versions and their 
cloud-based IDE.

One project I want to get around to some day for the PR2040 is a 
structured macro assembler. This boils down to a relatively trivial 
parser for the vanilla assembly language with recognition of some simple 
macros that do /if-then-else/, /while/, etc for the basic structured 
programming construct collection à la Dijkstra 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra>. with his seminal 
1972 book written with Dahl and Hoare 
<https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/structured-programming_car-hoare_o-j-dahl/331974/item/44698853/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw7pKFBhDUARIsAFUoMDZkRcyYWeGI3CG7IU9JrrMPiXo30HaTqCU1-DosM3xxBWPb-4e1H_YaAgGYEALw_wcB#idiq=44698853&edition=2051476>.  
There is a very nice structured macro assembler out there for the Moto 
68K and the source code for that would probably be a good starting 
point. If anybody else is interested in this let me know so we can 
coordinate a little project. Starting with the TI MSP430 I swore I'd get 
back to assembly language after a 20+ year hiatus, but there was always 
something more important and it is the case that assembler is mighty 
hard to justify with today's "all computing resources are close to free" 
situation making C the 21st century assembly language (and Java the 21st 
century COBOL, HA!). But the PR2040 seems like a good target and 
learning the M0+ instruction set would be useful for those of us who 
started with assembler to get back to our roots. I'm especially 
interested in interprocessor lock mechanisms that would allow for some 
hand rolled parallel loops using the two cores, assuming the necessary 
atomic instructions are not too expensive. Until it's time to jump to 
RISC V this little chip seems to me like a wonderful, very general 
solution for a lot of target applications. I can't wait to jump on this 
after clearing a few figurative decks.

Pete

On 5/18/21 10:05 PM, Peter Soper wrote:
> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/arduino-nano-rp2040-released
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.triembed.org/pipermail/triembed_triembed.org/attachments/20210519/771911aa/attachment.htm>