XBasic, the language I use is *extremely* fast. Nearly as fast as C, and can be hand optimized to be even faster. That is, if you're a masochist and like editing machine code! :)

To give an example, I'm currently working on a program to analyse Jim Berkland's predictions. It loads 6 different catalogs of quake data containing 30 years of date, latitude, longitude, and magnitude. These data files total over 100 megabytes - over 3.3 million data records. It then tests 337 of JOBS windows against this entire database looking for and counting hits. It also generates histograms of the contents of the quake catalogs.

All this in 33 seconds on my P4 2.4 Ghz machine with 1 gig RAM. I have a hyper threading CPU, and the program only uses one thread. So that basically means I'm only using half my CPU.

The XBasic language is not a real BASIC. The 'X' is short for "ex", as in ex-BASIC. It looks at first glance like a form of BASIC but is more highly structured and has much much more capability.

It's also 100% cross platform compatible between Windows and Linux. (unless you happen to use OS system calls for something weird)

It's stable. The last version was released 4 years ago. It has not needed a major change since.

Oh, and it does windows!! I mean, it can do GUI interfaces.

It's free!!! Yes, FREE!!!

It's open source, released under the GNU GPL and LPGL licenses.

Modifying XBasic is easy. XBasic is written in....you guessed it...Xbasic! :)

http://www.xbasic.org/
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/xbasic/
http://xbasic.sourceforge.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xbasic/

Brian