As a further point, it's the security and robustness of the code that I really like about the Picaxe. When I was working, we had a real problem with a safety critical item (an engine control unit) that had to be sourced from different suppliers (for reasons of security of supply - it was a critical part). Each supplier used the same basic hardware (that was a requirement to allow field repair) but each wrote their own code, in C++. The problem was that we discovered that different compilers produce different object code when given the same source code. As the only way of getting an adequate safety verification was to do a static code walk-through of the object (machine) code, checking that no untoward states could occur, we thought we'd only need to do three of these safety verification checks, one for the code from each supplier. It turned out that we needed to do over a dozen verifications, because the suppliers didn't always use the same C++ compiler, so we had different object code coming from the same source code!
As an aside, this is related in part, to the reason that the UK refused to allow some Chinooks purchased with US flight instruments to fly - there was no code verification and the manufacturers would not release the source code and object code to allow a static-code walk-through safety check. The UK flight safety authority refused to allow them to fly on this basis, so they sat in hangars for years, unused.
It's also a major concern I have with the Arduino. Unless you write, and verify, every single library you use then you are accepting the use of SOUP*** in your final code. To me that's unacceptable, as you have no way of knowing what might be embedded in any third party library you choose to use. At least with the Picaxe we have no SOUP at all, and can be reasonably confident, after all these years, that most of the bugs in the Picaxe interpreter have been found and fixed, or are at least, thanks to this forum, known about. Combined with the inherent security of not being able to read out the programme code (normally) this makes the Picaxe a pretty safe and reliable system, probably the best in this respect in the hobby market, by a fair margin.
*** SOUP = Software Of Unknown Provenance.
In general it's code that was written by someone unknown with an unknown level of verification and where the full attributes of its functions may also be unknown. Examples would be code snippets inserted into libraries to send data back to a third party whenever a device is connected to the internet somehow (perhaps via the programming interface) or to do something malicious under certain circumstances. It's most likly to be code that just wasn't fully tested, so has bugs that the author never found, though.
