In short: highly encouragedtypeset@protect
@@footnote
SF@gobble@opt
the phrase use in education might evoke
the association only fit for use in education.
This connotation is not intended but nevertheless risked as the licensing
of SDCC makes it difficult to offer educational discounts. If your rationales are to:
- give students a chance to understand the complete steps of
code generation
- have a curriculum that can be extended for years. Then you could use
an FPGA board as target and your curriculum will seamlessly extend
from logic synthesis (http://www.opencores.org opencores.org,
Oregano http://www.oregano.at/ip/ip01.htm), over assembly programming,
to C to FPGA compilers (FPGAC http://sourceforge.net/projects/fpgac/)
and to C.
- be able to insert excursions about skills like using a revision control
system, submitting/applying patches, using a type-setting (as opposed
to word-processing) engine
LYX
LyX/LATEX, using SourceForge http://sourceforge.net/,
following some netiquette http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netiquette,
understanding BSD/LGPL/GPL/Proprietary licensing, growth models of
Open Source Software, CPU simulation, compiler regression tests.
And if there should be a shortage of ideas then you can always point
students to the ever-growing feature request list http://sourceforge.net/p/sdcc/feature-requests/.
- not tie students to a specific host platform and instead allow them
to use a host platform of their choice (among them Alpha, i386,
i386_64, Mac OS X, Mips, Sparc, Windows and eventually OLPC http://www.laptop.org)
- not encourage students to use illegal copies of educational software
- be immune to licensing/availability/price changes of the chosen tool
chain
- be able to change to a new target platform without having to adopt
a new tool chain
- have complete control over and insight into the tool chain
- make your students aware about the pros and cons of open source software
development
- give back to the public as you are probably at least partially publicly
funded
- give students a chance to publicly prove their skills and to possibly
see a world wide impact
then SDCC is probably among the first choices. Well, probably SDCC
might be the only choice.