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.

I once worked for a company where their $500,000 unit ran no faster than their $100,000 unit. This, I soon found out was due to the coding (not '51) taking too much time to run the big unit fast enough. I asked to and got tasked with speeding the code up and did so and, eventually, the $500,000 unit was worth the price. The company, pleased with the results, tasked me with another software upgrade and assigned "a "new coder"" with a few recent enhancements to the code I rewrote. He started his mantra "you can't do that, you can't do this" and in about a month had the code running so slow that even the $100,000 unit was slower than when I started, but the code was "beautiful and to the rules". When I asked him "do you really believe we can get full price for a unit that slow" the answer was "that is irrelevant, the code has to be 'straight'"

Erik