Will ISR's be supported at some future date?

Hmm... ROBOTC has never really had any type of user controllable interrupts. We handle most of the timing overflow (PWM), Serial (UART tx/rx), analog reads in the firmware to provide the level of control to use these devices without having to know how to use interrupts. It's a little harder too because ROBOTC doesn't compile down to native AVR code like the Arduino language does, so it's not a matter of just including a library and "being done with it".

What type of ISR would you be looking for? Something like a pin-change ISR for encoders?

Well that would be the primary reason. For example we have a number of different Pololu motors with various encoder resolutions.

There are other examples where interrupts are beneficial, say like a digital PIR sensor, but one could probably get away with polling that on a separate task if necessary. You can't poll encoders however.

Not to speak for the TO, but I personally need pin interrupts (as you said), as well as timer interrupts. Both of these are essential for what I use Arduino for.

Excuse my ignorance, I'm still new to this, but what's an interrupt?

An interrupt service routine (ISR) is a function that is executed when a change happens on the Arduino. Normally it's when a particular digital pin changes value (goes from low to high or high to low). When that happens, the Arduino interrupts whatever code was being executed and immediately executes the ISR function.

Simple example: a button is hooked up on digital pin 2. If that button is pushed it forms a circuit making digital pin 2 go from low to high. When that happens the Arduino stops what it was doing and calls your ISR function.

Here is a real basic example from the Arduino website http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/AttachInterrupt .



In the code the function blink() is called whenever interrupt 0 changes (interrupt 0 is digital pin 2 just to make it confusing )

I normally use interrupts for quadrature encoders on motors. As a motor spins, a pulse (actually two) is sent from the encoder to the Arduino. I count each pulse using an ISR and I can determine how much the motor has spun and in which direction. The NXT motors for example have encoders inside them and they too send pulses to the NXT (through pins 5 & 6 to be exact).

There are also timer interrupts as (as well as interrupts for I2C, SPI, UART, etc...).