Mikro Elektronika Basic and PBP
I started with PicBasic Pro (PBP) with a Lab X1 development system. Did a bunch of work with it and loved it. Then I discovered MikroElektronica development board, the EasyPicV7. Wow! Lots of neat stuff and a great development system. Lots of support, good tech support and help files and they make a number of "click boards" (like Arduino "shields") to really wet your appetite. I then bought their Basic Compiler which is good in a lot of ways but not as good as PBP in others. For example, one of the things I do most is write to LCDs in all my projects. PBP lets you configure the LCD with 6 commands, Mikro requires about 12. That's for initialization. To write to the LCD, PBP allows multiple statements on a line, eg lcdout $FE,$80, "Reset Ok". In Mikro Basic: lcd_cmd (_lcd_clear), then lcd_out (1,1, txt1), where txt 1 was your previously defined string. Oh, the string has to be declared as well, so if it contains 10 characters, you have to declare it as 10. If you use 11 characters, your text will NOT display and you won't get an error. Very rigid. I tried to get Mikro Basic to display variable values, which requires another command, whereas with PBP, you can add it to the same string (as in the example I gave).
The Button command works the same way. Easy in PBP, hard in MikroBasic. The way Mikro Basic handles interrupts is all convoluted and complicated and doesn't seem to work the way I think interrupts work. Yet, in PBP, it's all very, very intuitive and works EXACTLY like I expect it to work.
I was in the middle of converting code from PBP into MikroBasic so I could use the V7 board, but it just isn't worth the time, because of all the required structure and syntax, not to mention double the amount of code.
If you are a former C programmer and like the structure and strict rules of programming, go with MikroBasic but be prepared to write twice as much code.
Bottom line: PBP rocks! It is a super compiler. And you get a book too.
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