iziBasic stands for easy Basic for Palm. It targets all kinds of developers and should be a very good tool for newbee programmers. Skilled programmers will also find in iziBasic a tool to develop very quickly and easily various types of software.

iziBasic is a high level development compiler which builds Stand-alone applications. The great thing is that it does all of that directly on-board of your Palm OS based device.
Source codes are easily written using:
- either the Memo Pad application which is shipped with all Palm OS devices,
- or an on-board third party DOC editor of your choice.

As its name also states it, iziBasic uses the BASIC high level and very easy to learn development language, a customized subset of it to be precise. You will discover how easy and quick it is to develop software with iziBasic when the more common development tools available on the Palm OS platform usually require pretty good development skills.

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Revision History

6.1 (09/17/07)

• Major bug fix: data stacks management (as implemented in version 5.0) would cause device freezes or soft resets on some devices and various other side effects. All developers should put on the market a new version of their applications compiled with this new version 6.1.
• Bug fix: in the console mode, a device freeze could occur when trying to display more than 64 characters on the same line.
• Bug fix: the WORD$ function would return an empty string for the last word if the last word was only one character long.
• Bug fix: the SCROLLBAR function would cause the Palm TX to crash into the black void of doom and reset.
• The COPY statement now preserves the records' unique ID, which is normally used only during synchronization with the desktop to track records on the Palm OS device with the same records on the desktop system but which has also proven to be used by some 3rd party applications (thanks to doeni for reporting).
• User manual fix for the COLORRGB function. CORLORRGB returns Red-Green-Blue gradients in this order and not Red-Blue-Green as previously indicated.
• Added the PROCESSEVENTS statement, which does the same thing as FLUSHEVENTS, that is processing events in case the events queue gets saturated.
• Added the FLUSHQUEUE statement, which flushes the pen and key queues (thanks to JoeV for the suggestion).
• Added 2 new options to the compiler: one to always replace an existing target file without asking first and one to launch the execution of the application right away after a successful compilation (thanks to Dave for the good idea).
• Added a new sample application, so called iHeadAche, and upgraded the tinyBasic sample application. These are two interpreters for two development languages made with iziBasic in 2006 as entertainment projects.
• Added a pack of 3rd party "PP applets", made available in 2006 as a separate download.
• Added Txt2LionDoc as an alternative to MakeDoc, for converting text files to Palm DOC files, in the appendix about how to develop an iziBasic project on a Windows PC using the PsPad or the ConTEXT editors

6.0 (Nov 2006)

• Please see extensive history on Developer website

5.2 (05/24/05)

• Bug fix: the SQRT function returns back correct values (this was a regression since one or few iziBasic version(s) due to a change in the PP compiler and not ported to the Math library used to build iziBasic)
• "Very weird" bug fix: the compiled program could freeze or come to soft reset the device in some very particular cases, due to a bug in the final compiled code optimizer (well, it took me one month to figure this one out! This is why I qualify it as being "very weird"?)
• Bug fix: the SELECT CASE / END SELECT statements set would only work with the A-Z and A$???-Z$??? variables, not with the Numbers and Text variables with more than one character defined with the DIM statement
• Bug fix: UPDATEVALUE would not work on some GUI objects (PUSHUBUTTON and CHECKBOX) after an UPDATETEXT was made on these objects
• Bug fix: UPDATEFIELD would keep some heap memory space locked
• Bug fix: any operation on objects in a form opened by OPENFORM would cause a crash unless a FLUSHEVENTS or an event loop (DOEVENTS, WAITEVENT) was applied just after the OPENFORM statement
• Added a new {INCLUDE t} compiling statement, to include one source code into another one and have the iziBasic compiler parse the source codes accordingly
• Added support for global variables in the so called "PP applets", for up to 256 bytes of global variables (256 bytes seems already large enough, but this could very easily be extended on request)
• Added a new sample program to demonstrate the use of the freeware CPDB library (http://cpdb.ppcompiler.org/) using a "PP applet"

5.1 (04/04/05)

• Bug fix: compilation would crash in some cases when iziBasic was not installed using the standard HotSync procedure but using some third party tool instead (RescoExplorer for instance).
• Bug fix: in some cases, the compiler generated a misalignment between the A() array and the %var% variables (Numbers variables with more than one character) in the stack and, with no surprise, the same bug was found for the A$?() array and the %var$? variables (Text variables with more than one character).
• Bug fix: now Numbers and Text variables with more than one character (%var% and %var$?) can be passed among CHAINed programs and are also considered as global variables like the A-Z and A$?-Z$? default variables.
• Bug fix: in the case a comment was added with a " ' " character in front of a " : " statements delimiter (so, the " ': " sequence), the comment was ignored and compilation would give unpredictable results.
• Menu's open and close events are now tracked. The MENUITEM function returns 0 if the menu was just opened or -1 if the menu was just closed.
• Extended the FLUSHEVENTS statement capabilities by adding a new facultative parameter to it.
• Upgraded the auto-repeating queuing of hard button keys events management loop in iziBasic's virtual machine.
• Added a final code optimization in the math parsing routine (when using the {PARSER ON} compiling directive) for a smaller application size and a faster execution at runtime.
• Added key shortcuts to launch different controls in iziBasic's interface.
• With SrcEdit, iziBasic can now receive from SrcEdit which source code to compile, start compiling automatically (without needing to press the [Build it] button) and send in return to SrcEdit the line where a compilation error was found (but not the error message because SrcEdit does not offer to manage this information) so that SrcEdit can open the source code directly on the line where the found error is.
• Added bookmarks in the user manual for a much easier browsing in the documentation.