I started using the DOS version of PowerBASIC back in the late 80's or around 1990. I used it to develop some commercial applications. I started with QuickBasic and very quickly outgrew it (ran out of memory for my programs to run). So I switched to Microsoft's Professional Basic, which was great. But then along came PowerBASIC, and I never looked back. Of course, that's 'ancient history' when it comes to computers and programming languages. Now, PowerBASIC is available in a Console Compiler version as well as a Windows version. The Windows version now includes object capabilities (if you want to use them, but you don't have to), threading, and many functions that are typical of C or C#. But the syntax is still like "basic", instead of the more-cryptic style of syntax like C or C#. There are some very nice 3rd party tools that have been developed to work with PowerBASIC, to further enhance it's capabilities and/or make it easier and faster to develop applications. For example, EZ-GUI is a development tool that includes a visual designer as well as a library of hundreds of functions, many of which would be accessible in PowerBASIC through the Windows API, but EZ-GUI makes them much easier to use. In a nutshell, PowerBASIC isn't even close, in my opinion, to what it started out as. It's much much more advanced than that. For me, where I learned 'procedural' programming (and I've done some assembly-language programming for embedded systems, too), using PowerBASIC is much easier than languages like VB.Net. For someone who learned objected-oriented programming first, I suspect that PowerBASIC won't be their 'favorite' language.

John Rayfield, Jr.