BASIC is a language whose time has come ... and gone. It has been rejected, along with a few others, because, among other reasons, it teaches "bad" programming practices and procedures. There's a reason that these are considered "bad" and that's that it is quite unstructured and doesn't support organization even as well as assembly language does.

If you want to do things with microcontrollers, even just as a mental-masturbation exercise, you'll save lots of money on aspirin, whiskey, MAALOX, and prune juice if you use assembly language, 'C', or Pascal because they're widely supported in literature and free information on the www.

You've already mentioned a few limitations that BASCOM imposes. There are others, and many of them are very inconvenient.

Assembly language, while somewhat cryptic at first, teaches you a great deal about the hardware of your MCU, all of which will be useful when you endeavor to learn 'C', to which some have referred as "portable assembler" because of its ready adaptation to other architectures.

Now, you can play with BASCOM, as I did for a number of years before the PC, but even then the pressure was on using 'C' or PASCAL, if for no other reason than program maintenance was much easier.

RE