Unfortunately, the company's coding standards are against the use of assembler quoting reasons of longer to debug, harder to maintain and harder for new coders to be able to take over projects.

I guess whoever came up with these "standards" is firmly rooted in the x86/PC/Windoze world and has very little knowledge of the uC/DSP world. It is pretty much impossible to write an efficient uC/DSP program without knowing the underlying architecture (and yes, this includes being familiar with the local assembly dialect), and still very unlikely to write it without using a least some bits of assembly. (Especially if the compiler, supplied by the manufacturer of the chip, doesn't know about 60% of the chips instructions and has some fairly nasty bugs ... but I digress).

And if they let a "new coder" take over a C51 project written in C, without the new coder being familiar with the '51 architecture, then they're in for a big and potentially nasty surprise.

My own '51 project is mostly in C, but this is because I can afford it (the "previous version" ran on a 12-clocker and was in assembly, now we're using a 1-clocker, which is just twiddling its thumbs most of the time).