Hello Guido,

Palm programming should not be considered as PC programming, even today with the new devices full of memory that are less and less a PDA and more and more a small PC!


There are indeed several technical limitations/considerations to have in mind when programming on a Palm device:

One is that a memory segment is 64 KB (minus a few bytes for the OS purposes) maximum. So, in a 64 KB segment, you may put up to roughly 16000 real numbers, up to roughly 1000 strings of 64 characters or 500 strings of 128 characters (I chose fixed size strings to ease the pointing of those variables in iziBasic's virtual machine). iziBasic deals with the available memory on the different devices and with a limited number of stack segments. I could have linked several segments for numbers/strings storage but this would have been extra & difficult work...
The demo version of iziBasic is limited to a single partial segment which lets it work without any trouble on a Palm OS 3.0 device. The difference between full and trial versions is explained in the user manual, look for the MINOSVERSION compiling directive (Your request for 6x365=2190 numbers storage would be covered in the full version ).

Another consideration is that database accesses are very fast because the data memory storage is in RAM not on a hard drive or some other slow access peripheral (that was one of the surprises with the new LifeDrive from Palm...).


Having these 2 facts in mind, Palm developers usually try to minimize the "dynamic memory" usage and to work on pieces of data at one time, not on the whole data. By the way, this is one of the exciting aspects on programming on this platform
Then, your example should typically be coded using a database on a Palm device. With a pointer (the given day of the year) to scan/update the right days in the database.


I have no trouble with competition, all development tools have their pros and cons. Developing an interpreter is just a little bit easier than developing a compiler I set the priorities in the GUI part for iziBasic. As time goes on, and as I find some free time to dedicate to this hobby project, I will try to improve different areas, among which those you cleverly highlighted. But, this should not stop you from "thrifty coding"


About the errors you report in the Simulator, I am very surprised because I test all versions of iziBasic in the Simulator, especially when working on tough parts of the source code when I get a lot of crashes And I never got these errors for these objects. So, thank you for the information, I will try to change some parameters in the Simulator to check.


Cheers

@+
aldweb