I must disagree with your description, Joseph, on the simple basis that NOTHING entered in a text editor is in any form other than mnemonic.

The whole purpose of the assembler is to translate what we can enter and understand into something the MCU can interpret and execute. Everything is in mnemonic form because we can't enter binary, hexadecimal, or octal values.

We can only enter mnemonic representations of them. Further, the instruction is more than just one byte, while the opcode is always a single byte, represented in the assembler as a mnemonic (text) object.

The complete instruction consists not only of the opcode but of the mode descriptors and argument list.

While most assemblers have the capability of generating Intel HEX files, that's not the only format used for programming PROMs or MCU's. Some of my programmers accept binary, some accept HEX, and some accept S-record format. Most accept all three, but I think you get my point. Some of the freeware assemblers available for the 805x series produce one or more of these and Intel-HEX, though common, is not always among them.

You're probably right about the KEIL demo package and its applicability to Mike's situation. There are, however, free assemblers, linkers, simulators, etc, that don't impose a code size limitation. Choosing tools is a personal thing, and I would leave that up to the individual's preferences. It will probably be a while before Mike is generating larger blocks of code than what KEIL's demoware supports.

RE