Someone Please Explain The Difference...
Decorating By cakes4all Updated 5 Oct 2006 , 10:32pm by cakeatopia
They are all made of the same base ingredients, but the separate additions to each make them different.
Sugarpaste is fondant in some parts of the world, but it is gumpaste in other parts. Pastillage dries very hard, and is often used in structure - for instance, the bases you see on many chocolate or sugar sculptures are made of pastillage.
Gumpaste is made to be rolled very thin. if you are using pastillage, a 1/4-1/8 inch thickness is recommended.
Theresa 
Around here, us Okies use fondant for the cake covering (a few call it sugarpaste). Gumpaste is essentially fondant with Tylose added to give it more stretch, strength, and faster drying time. It is used for small, delicate work. Pastillage is just powdered sugar, Tylose, and water (there are other recipes). It has no stretch, crusts and cracks VERY quickly, dries rock hard and as mentioned before is used for structural purposes.
If the books you get are from overseas, then fondant is usually called sugarpaste. However, I do have some books that call gumpaste sugarpaste! So I have to look at what they are showing to know which one was meant. It can be very confusing. 
I hope I haven't confused you more.
Michele
i was wondering the same thing. I checked out some books from the library and it looked like fondant but they called it sugar or gum paste. Thanks for posting!
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