>> There is also something called NSBasic (www.nsbasic.com) -
>> using the BASIC  sytnax. Is that not an IDE or is it not Visual Basics?
>
>Take the S off of that, and it works ;P  I have to admit, NSBasic looks 
>good.  
>It seems, however, that is standard BASIC, not Visual Basic in structure.
>
>I feel that BASIC is a bit of a kludge (i.e. poor choice) of a language for 
>very small devices.  Requiring a ~100K (99594 byte) runtime module is 
>counter-productive.  I can write any program in C that can be written in 
>BASIC, without the runtime.  My programs will always be 100K smaller than 
>BASIC ones (size taken from NSBRuntime)... my predigeses are well known, 
>however. ;-)

Basic has always been around on small devices - many much smaller than 
the Palm. It can be critized as inelegant, non standard and slower than 
C. On the other hand, it's flexible, easy to learn, quick to develop in 
and very widely used.

There really isn't any such thing as standard Basic. I've programmed in 
close to 20 dialects of it myself. NS Basic/Palm is a reasonable subset 
of Microsoft's VB: we've left out some fancy features and stuff that has 
no place on the Palm, from a UI or Palm OS viewpoint. We've added 
features to take advantage of the Palm environment. VB programmers seem 
to be at home quickly.

>>      AppForg[e] (www.appforge.com)
>
>Very professional looking, and uses VB structure.  If I was to recommend a 
>BASIC product (which I'm not ;) I'd go with this one.

Have you seen the size of the runtime on this one? It's many times larger 
than NS Basic's. (and last I heard, they don't support Palm OS 5...)

George Henne                                     
NS BASIC Corporation
http://www.nsbasic.com 


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