Back in the days when we were all using DOS, I had the idea of gauging the speed of a language by its ability to sort. I had a file of 1,000 words and the basic I was using would sort it in 6 minutes. We didn't have Pentiums those days. When I bought Turbo Basic, running it on the same computer got it down to less that three minutes. Someone told me PowerBasic was so fast I wouldn't believe it was actually doing anything. They were right. I bought PowerBASIC and the same sort was instantaneous. I've never used anything else since. The further PowerBASIC goes, the better it gets.