Any electronic engineers on here ??

[poptones]

-But where are they, how comes Synaptic has so little in the 8051
department ??-

You're not going to find many embedded tools in synaptic. Most of these
tools come supplied in source, or at best maybe as an rpm. They usually
don't have many dependancies and are pretty easy to compile. And I
think the assumption is if you're writing embedded code you should at
least be capable of operating a compiler.

The parts you describe in these micros are minimalistic because a) it
keeps down silicon and, thus, cost and b) you can better define a state
machine in software. Stripped down, general purpose, they do what the
code needs and nothing more. 

The new ones have primitives for DSP as well (including a MAC unit),
and can address larger chunks of memory. But those aren't two bucks
each.


-- 
poptones