Tim Wescott wrote:

I feel the AVR instruction set is superior to the PIC. It's a much easier
instruction set to program for in assembly, and it is designed with C in
mind. This means that the AVR will run the same thing faster, and with less
code space. If it were an engineer asking I would recommend that the AVR be
given precidence. If you must have BASIC, or if you must have some
peripheral that's available on the PIC that's not available on the AVR, then
that's the way you'll need to go.

I really wasn't trying to say "AVR is better than PIC", I was just
pointing out an alternative that's totally free (and open-source).

Otherwise learn C and use an AVR.

But, I must say, I totally agree with you. I'm
quite pleased with the AVR-GCC port and avr-libc.
Sure, if you insist on using the full floating-point
printf, it's like 5k for "hello world", but even that's
not bad really.

Dana K6JQ