3.9 Summary

mikroC Pro for PIC is one of the most commonly used high-level languages for programming PIC microcontrollers. This chapter presented a brief introduction to the mikroC Pro for PIC language.

Variables in a mikroC Pro for PIC language store values during running of a program and they can be 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit or floating point. Variables are stored in the data memory of the target microcontroller. Constants, on the other hand, are variables that have fixed values and they are stored in the flash memory (program memory) of the target microcontroller.

mikroC Pro for PIC supports several statements for changing the flow of control in a program, such as if, else, do, while, switch and break statements.

Pointers are useful features of the C language and they are used to store the memory addresses of variables. By using pointers, we can easily pass data to functions and manipulate arrays.

The mikroC Pro for PIC IDE is a powerful and easy-to-use environment for creating, editing and compiling our programs. In addition, the IDE supports simulation and debugging features, which helps in the development and testing of programs. The use of the simulator has been described in this chapter, step by step, in a tutorial fashion.

The mikroC Pro for PIC IDE supports some other useful features, such as memory, function and variable usage statistics, Assembly listing of the created program, 7-segment display font creation, RS232 USART terminal, ASCII listing, EEPROM editor, online Help, and so on.