| Authors: Cristian Săbiuţă, Cristina Ionescu, Microchip Technology Inc. |
This technical brief provides the steps recommended to successfully program a PIC16 or PIC18 microcontroller and defines coding guidelines to help write more readable and reusable code.
High-level programming languages are a necessity due to imposed short development time and high-quality requirements. These languages make it easier to maintain and reuse code due to better portability and readability than the low-level instructions specific for each microcontroller architecture.
Programming language alone does not ensure high readability and reusability, but good coding style does. Therefore, the PIC® peripherals, header files and drivers are designed according to this presumption.
Since the most widely used high-level programming language for PIC microcontrollers is C, this document will focus on C programming. To ensure compatibility with most PIC C compilers, the code examples in this document are written using ANSI C coding standard.