Somebody sent a message on this subject back in March or February
and I lost track of it. I am still searching for the message.

I just got around to taking a look and it looks
great. PIC does not directly support BASIC and the after market
version of PIC Basic is not well integrated with the new PIC
32 bit products. It is also not as powerful as ZBasic and it cost
$250 while ZBasic is free.

http://www.zbasic.net/downloads.php

C is unnecessarily cryptic IMHO and I refuse to waste time
learning it. PC computers are very powerful these days
and you should be able to program them in easily understood
plain language and let them do all the work converting the
program to bits and bytes. The one thing I did not like
about the real time Linux approach.

There is a USB interface so one can send MAP and fuel
table display data to a cheap net book in the cockpit.
There is also a RS232 device so real time GPS data can be
input through a NEMA 0183 standard aircraft interface.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMEA_0183

The processors have as many as 100 I/O pins that make
designing a printed circuit EFI controller board much simpler.

                 ZX-24 Series Devices
            AVR                       Persistent Program
Device Microcontroller Mode    RAM     Memory    Memory
 ZX-24  ATmega32        VM     1536      992       32K
ZX-24a  ATmega644       VM     3584     2016       32K
ZX-24p ATmega644P       VM     3584     2016       32K
ZX-24n ATmega644P      Native  4096     2016       62K
ZX-24r ATmega1284P      VM    15744     4064       60K
ZX-24s ATmega1284P     Native 16384     4064      124K


It has a very powerful BASIC which appears to be a superset
of QuickBasic.

                 Standard Reserved Words
alias              enum                persistentstructure
and                eqv                 persistenttype
array              erase               preserve
as                 exit                print
attribute          for                 private
based              function            progmem
bit                get                 public
boolean            gosub               put
boundedstring      goto                redim
byref              if                  register
byte               imp                 rem
bytealign          imports             resume
bytetabledata      in                  return
bytetabledatarw    input               rset
bytevectordata     int                 seek
bytevectordatarw   integer             select
byval              integertabledata    set
call               integertabledatarw  sgn
calltask           integervectordata   single
case               integervectordatarw singletabledata
ccur               is                  singletabledatarw
cdate              lbound              singlevectordata
cdec               let                 singlevectordatarw
close              like                sizeof
const              lock                spc
currency           long                static
cvar               longtabledata       step
cverr              longtabledatarw     stop
date               longvectordata      string
declare            longvectordatarw    stringtabledata
defbool            loop                stringvectordata
defbyte            lset                sub
defcur             me                  tab
defdate            mod                 then
defdbl             module              to
defdec             new                 type
defint             next                ubound
deflng             nibble              unlock
defobj             not                 unsignedinteger
defsng             open                unsignedlong
defstr             option              until
defvar             or                  variant
dim                persistent          vb_name
do                 persistentboolean   volatile
doevents           persistentbyte      wend
double             persistentinteger   while
each               persistentlong      with
else               persistentsingle    write
elseif             persistentsingle    xor
end                persistentstring

I am going to continue to investigate this as a EFI program
can be written in as little as a week using BASIC.

Paul Lamar