Richard,
I don't know much about C but can you explain what you mean by the the inherent blocking nature of basic in the context of comparing with C?
Yes, PAUSE blocks the CPU but doesn't Delayms() do the same?

Comparing different compilers and different languages is hard and is probably never going to be really fair. There's always more than one way to do certain things and I bet that if we try we can swing the result either way by just doing it differently. Using HIGH/LOW instead of direct ports access for example - that's a 100% performance increase right there. Yes, it's not 100% equal operationally but most of the time the user doesn't switch between inputs and outputs anyway. That's just one example.

Floats may be another. PBP doesn't have it natively so it can't win there. On the other hand, it's not often that you can't make do with 32bit integers and that's most likely going to beat floats from a performance and code space perspective anytime. Not as straight forward to use though.

I agree that the lack of "real" string handling procedures is a drawback for PBP. ArrayRead can be used to some extent though. Sometimes I really miss proper functions and local variables as well - especially as the projects grows. I can only imagine what Sheldons project is like to maintain, hitting 128k in size.

I don't know if there's a standard way that 'C' handles interrupts but I would imagine that it TOO must save and restore a bunch of system variables on entry/exit - just as is the case with DT-Ints.

/Henrik.