cnc--
Before you decide on PBP, I would suggest you also try the Proton compiler demo, and get a feel for which you prefer. The bottom line is that both are great compilers, and you won't go wrong with either. They are both based on the BS2 language, although Crownhill hasn't tried as hard to adhere to it as they've expanded Proton. I have purchased and used both compilers, and now almost exclusively use Proton. I would say that PBP is a tiny bit better for newbies, for two reasons. The parser is a little more forgiving with extra parentheses, and it's also able to parse out longer calculations. (Also, it's a little closer to BS2 compatibility--and a lot of newbies try to paste code.)

I use Proton, however, because I prefer it. If you know and are comfortable with asm, then you may also. Proton allows you to use bytes, words (2 bytes) and dwords (4 bytes signed) and floats all in one file without selecting a separate compiler. It also has a few more commands, in addition to built in support for interrupts. And quite a few of the "undocumented" features of the compiler are available on the forum, allowing you to go wild. More importantly (for some projects), however, the code is always more compact with Proton, because it has an optimizer that takes a few additional passes, depending on your settings. Sure, PBP has a great user-base supplied interrupt routine, but the code is still always larger than with Proton, even with Proton's optimizer off. And the bigger the program (i.e. crossing page boundaries) the bigger the difference in code size.

Oh, yeah... Proton also puts out a readable ASM file, rather than a file filled with macros. That's probably the main reason the optimizer is superior on Proton--because it has one, and PBP leaves all macro code as-is, with no optimization. But that's also why PBP compiles in less time, since it doesn't make optimizing passes.

FWIW, Crownhill, the company who brought us Proton, also brought you this forum.
http://www.protonbasic.co.uk/forum.php