In the May/June 2000 issue of QL Today, George Gwilt mentions that he has updated Turbo to work under SMSQ/E. He also mentions creating TurboPE, a Pointer Environment interface for Turbo. He does not go into any details nor give any code examples, so I can’t say how easy TurboPE will be to use over other PE tools (QPTR, EasyPTR, and Qmenu). He does not even mention if these existing tools will work with Turbo.
Given that Turbo will be freeware, I’m making a fair guess that TurboPE will also be freeware. As useful as QPTR, EasyPTR, and esp. Qmenu are, they are all commercial programs. It is possible to write freeware applications with these tools, but distributing a fully working program is limited. Qmenu may not be distributed with a freeware application, EasyPTR routines may be compiled into an application, but permission must be granted for each application, and QPTR does not mention if it can be compiled into an application. Granted the PE can not be freely distributed so any freeware PE programs must assume the user already has the PE, only Qmenu is distributed with other programs.
So having a freeware SuperBasic compiler with a freeware toolkit for accessing the PE will give the QL programmer a little more freedom in what he can write and distribute. I look forward to the release of both Turbo and TurboPE.