Erel,
FIrst I need to reiterate that I am still very happy to have moved to Basic4PPC! I have got more coding done in a week than I did in months on NSBasic, it has (generally - see my other posts) been a simple process, debugging is a dream in comparison and the potential to push the limits of what my program will do are far greater. In fact the only problems I have had are in trying to do things I would never had contemplated doing in NSB.
Anyway, yes I was using the optimised compiler. I tried the new code and it did improve - this time I got 3500, over 3 times faster but still 1/3 the speed of NSBasic.
I am sure you are right that in other comparisons the results would be very different.
I only got interested in benchmarking because my program is reading and parsing some text files and as that was taking an appreciable time even on the PC and I wanted to see how the PDA would do. By the way the new benchmark clocks 56000 in the Windows IDE and 1,800,000 as a compiled exe!