Real Newbie needs some help and advice

Hi Rodw
I tent to disagree with your judgements of hal versus cl.
For one hal is not a usual language, it's way of working is not intuitive.
It has no clear structured semantic ( talking of those not in use -> "habits" ).
There is nothing like a crossreference.
You have to read a lot of lines and it's not easy to see what sticks together.
It is very easy to write unreadable spaghetti in hal.

At least for pure logic CL is more straight forward. And it is visual. More compact. Easier to read. As long as you stay in digital or "simple numbers"

And just remember how often beginners have problems to write hal. The thinking in nets with name, one "sender" and multiple "receivers"... You have to get used to.
That remembers me to the old hw related wire wrapping.

Mike

P. S.
Me talking positiv about cl; also I do not like ladder, I think it is my most unliked plc language ;-()

Mike_Eitel wrote: And just remember how often beginners have problems to write hal. The thinking in nets with name, one "sender" and multiple "receivers"... You have to get used to.
That remembers me to the old hw related wire wrapping.

Mike

P. S.
Me talking positiv about cl; also I do not like ladder, I think it is my most unliked plc language ;-()

Interesting your last comment

I always make it a habit to create the signal on one line and connect it to each pin on separate one or more lines. Then the <= and => make sense to the reader.

I found that where code has the signal created and connected to the pin on one line are much harder to maintain if you wish to connect the signal to another pin. Its easy to write incomprehensible code in any "language" so we develop our own coding styles to make code easy to read. . I guess thats my HAL coding style

For me HAL was the best thing ever since i know electronics so that just worked for me.
And it is the single most reason i love EMC2/LinuxCNC.

I like both and will continue to use both

tommylight wrote: For me HAL was the best thing ever since i know electronics so that just worked for me.
And it is the single most reason i love EMC2/LinuxCNC.

But the ability to write your own component to extend the system is the best thing ever since I know programming so that just worked for me.
And it is the single most reason i love [strike]EMC2[/strike] Linuxcnc....


Really the architecture of Hal where complex systems can be broken up into small discrete components firewalled from the rest of the system and you can write your own which is treated as if its part of the core code is Hal's hidden gem (for those that venture there). And it often gets rid of the obfuscation in hal files some have mentioned...

All i know about C is #include<stdio.h> and even that is probably wrong