> Swordfish - I just saw this. How does it compare? How about the company?
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I've been using Swordfish for over a year (started as an alpha tester 
and then a beta tester) and it's an excellent product--the best PIC 
BASIC that I've seen.

It supports functions and subroutines, with local and global variables, 
the usual variety of variable types, and user-defined structures. The 
compiler has very good RAM memory overlay/reuse features, so that local 
RAM used by one subroutine can be overwritten by local RAM used another 
subroutine, so long as they do not call each other.

It has a decent support library and the library is written in Swordfish 
so you can extend or modify it as necessary. (Some pieces of the library 
are in assembler for speed, but 95% or more is in Swordfish.) I have 
contributed code that is incorporated into the 320x240 graphics library 
that is now part of the standard Swordfish release.

The price is reasonable. It supports only 18F series devices.

The developer, Mecanique, is a small company but has provided compiler 
elements other companies have incorporated into their products, as I 
understand it.

There are some speed and size benchmark comparisons for Swordfish versus 
Mikro,  recently posted at the Swordfish Wiki.
http://www.sfcompiler.co.uk/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=SwordfishUser.Comparison

The compilers compared are

    * Swordfish BASIC - Version 1.1.4.8
    * CCS C (PCH) - Version 4.02
    * MikroElectronika BASIC - Version 5.0.0.2
    * PROTON BASIC- Version 3.2.5.5
    * PicBASIC PRO- Version 2.47

No compiler is bug-free but Swordfish has been remarkably good even in 
the alpha days. My main product, the Z90 digital panadapter, uses an 
18F4620 PIC, and it was running functioning code even from the earliest 
alpha releases. The bugs found during alpha and beta testing were 
promptly fixed. I had started development with Mikro Pascal but had to 
abandon that due to Mikro's bugs and failure to fix the bugs after being 
reported.

Jack
www.cliftonlaboratories.com
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