Sanity check time:

Someone else wrote:
> I was really disappointed/shocked in the performance numbers Scott Edwards
> quoted in the article; they were something like 1,000x slower than what I
> would consider a "decent" compiler (I seem to remember that a hand-written
> assembler could be as much as 1,400x better) for the speed the PIC was
> running at.  Now, it is 10-50x better than the STAMP, but it's really pretty
> slow.

The PIC is a computer, each interpreted BASIC statement takes some number of
PIC instructions to execute, a compiler removes the interpreter part and
 substitutes
for it just enough instructions to accomplish the computation. So ask yourself
 this:

A.) "How many PIC instructions would it take me to implement TOGGLE 1 ?"

B) "How many PIC instructions would it take to switch on the TOGGLE byte code,
     interpret an argument, and then change the state of the pin?"

Now Divide B by A and that is your maximum speed up. If you *EXPECT* a 1000x
improvement then you think it would take 1000 instructions to implement a single
BASIC command. That is clearly unrealistic. 10x - 50x says to me "It takes
 between
10 and 50 times more instructions to interpret a byte code than it does to do it
directly." Which is a reasonable statement.

--Chuck