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From: Kelsey Bjarnason <kbjarnason@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.os.linux.embedded
Subject: Re: Reading the Riot Act To ARM's developers
Date: Fri, 10 Feb 2012 21:22:44 -0800
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[snips]

On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 23:43:43 +0000, 7 wrote:

> Typically the CMSIS library forces you to write code using hard coded
> numbers. So you want to set some flag to enable an interrupt it would
> read something like
> 
> SYSCON->INT |= (1<<4)
> 
> Here is the crunch, who the hell is going to know if its the 4th bit or
> the 14th bit when you got a million of these lines of code?
> 
> Shortest possible answer NOBODY. Not even you!!!!!!!!!
> 
> And then you change CPU, and something changes in hardware, how will you
> know what to look for - you gonna search for "4" all throughout the
> code?????


Are you actually using a tool so bad it doesn't let you define your own 
symbols?

define	INT_XMA	(1 << 4)

...

SYSCON->INT |= INT_XMA

Need to change INT_XMA?  Change it in one place, *every* usage of it 
changes.  If your development tools can't cope with this - and, ideally, 
with include files - then you should consider using a macro preprocessor 
to generate the compilable code from the maintainable code.

Either way, has nothing to do with ARM, per se; just to do with an 
apparently crippled toolchain and/or a developer who can't look beyond 
the trivial tool to see possible solutions.