[Noah]

I think that with the changes in PBASIC 2.5, it is becoming a repectable language. I think the biggest thing about it that bothered me was the syntax for the IF/THEN statements (IF condition) THEN address: ), but that has been changed!! (IF (condition) THEN codeGoesHere! ). That's a major improvement. It means that the code is suddenly a LOT cleaner, with a lot less jumps around the code. I already wonder how I got along without that...

I feel that PBASIC provides a very good medium for the FIRST robotics competition programming. First, it's related to BASIC, which is a very popular language that is (pardom the pun) very basic. It's easy for novice teams to grasp, and allows Innovation first to use the inexpensive BASIC Stamps by parallax to power the robot controllers. In addition, PBASIC allows novice programmers robots to perform almost as well as those of the veteran programmers. (I know that many of you might disagree with that statement, but I believe it to be true.)

Also, while the PBASIC Stamps provide enough processing power and memory for our needs, we still must learn to conserve space, keep code short and optimized, and write it efficiently. (This would be where an experienced programmer can defeat the novice)

With all that said, is anyone planning on running checks testing the efficiency of PBASIC 2.5 code versus 2.0 code? I would be interested to see which runs faster. If no one else is, I would run a couple tests.