I think it depends on how you look at that question.
For most users there is potential for auto-optimised improvement, because the new commands avoid some unoptimised constructs which may otherwise get created, such as the commonly seen ...
- WaitForPinHigh:
- IF pin0 = 1 THEN GotPinHigh
- GOTO WaitForPinHigh
- GotPinHigh:
The ...
- DO
- ' Nothing
- LOOP UNTIL Pin0 = 1
gives the best optimised solution without any effort of ...
- WaitForPinHigh:
- IF pin0 <> 1 THEN WaitForPinHigh
The IF-THEN-ELSE-ENDIF construct can also handle inverting conditionals for optimising which could otherwise be a little difficult to fathom ...
- IF pin0 = 0 AND pin1 = 1 THEN
- ' Do this
- END IF
To be optimised well without extraneous GOTO's has to become ...
- IF pin0 = 1 OR pin1 = 0 THEN SkipThis
- ' Do this
- SkipThis:
For those who don't optimise or don't have the experience to do it, the new block structures offer benefits.
In some cases though, helping a programmer express themselves with clarity in the high level may run counter to producing compact code. The ON-GOSUB statement is a particular case in point, and SELECT-CASE isn't as optimised as a long sequence of IF-THEN's could be. That's also been the case in the past, such as CALIBFREQ with a negative number.
The one benefit everyone gets from the enhanced compiler is better optimisation of 'LET var=number' and 'LET var=var' assignments which occur fairly frequently in most code. This makes the ( visually horrible and limited ) trick of using a FOR without a NEXT as a shorter assignment than LET redundant.
The bottom line is, in my opinion, that, for those skilled at optimising and needing optimisation, the new block structured commands offer nothing beyond more clarity and speed in writing code with a need to keep watch on the code in case it un-optimises.
In that case ( which is what I your question asks ); it's probably better to write hand-optimised code using old constructs, then convert to block structured for readability if it doesn't impact, but even then, it may be worth paying a small price if nested IF's make code so much easier to write and understand.
For most cases though, using the new structures won't have a negative impact on code size, may give some optimisations for zero effort, and the benefits in clarity and ease of coding should outweigh any counter-optimisation effects.
