Simon's BASIC was pretty popular, and also has a compiler. Noticably faster than the inbuilt basic v2.0, but also inherited a lot of v7.0.
Simon's BASIC was indeed pretty popular, but it was noticably slower than BASIC 2.0, not faster. An easy test for this would be a simple FOR...NEXT loop. Of course, graphics and such were faster as you needed much less code to obtain a certain result. Simon's BASIC commands were much more powerfull compared to the rather crude BASIC 2.0.
Apart from that, it could not have inherited anything from BASIC 7.0: Simon's BASIC is from 1983, BASIC 7.0 (the C128, that is) is from 1985. If anything, it would be the other way around.
Simon's BASIC was a way cool BASIC extension. Very impressive for its day.
