True enough. In theory it could be up to 255. In practice, I've personally never seen it exceed 16. And, in practice, I have seen just single bytes on an Intel HEX line even though the address of the byte in question followed the previous and preceeded the following line sequentially. I assume those cases must be because the assembler (or linker, if there is one) is outputting the data to the Intel HEX file as soon as it knows what goes there rather than waiting to see if more data will follow sequentially which could be placed on the same Intel HEX line.

When I developed Pinnacle, I had the linker output the binary data to a memory image in RAM, and then it goes through the entire image and dumps it to the Intel HEX file using 16-byte lines whenever possible. I guess there's really no particular benefit in doing that, but it just seemed like the right way to do it to me. Once in a blue moon I have found myself inspecting a HEX file, and I've found it much easier to deal with constant 16-byte lines than a mish-mash of differently sized lines.

Regards,
Craig Steiner