scope
XBasic variables can choose from a complete set of scopes:

°  AUTO
°  AUTOX
°  STATIC
°  SHARED
°  SHARED /groupname/
°  EXTERNAL
°  EXTERNAL /groupname/

operators
XBasic supports complete sets of arithmetic, bitwise, logical, shift, and address operators, including:

& and && address operators
<<< and >>> arithmetic shifts
<< and >> bitwise shifts
! !! && ^^ || logical NOT, TEST, AND, XOR, OR

bitfields
XBasic supports a readable, efficient, machine independent mechanism for creating bitfield definitions. Bitfields can be created, cleared, set, and extracted from numeric variables efficiently. For example, $$TYPE = BITFIELD(5,20) defines a 5-bit wide bitfield starting at bit 20. newType = part{$$TYPE} extracts an unsigned bitfield from part and assigns it to newType . newType = part{{$$TYPE}} extracts a signed bitfield. Bitfield operations are so efficient that the preceding examples take only one machine cycle on some CPUs.

strings
XBasic string variables automatically resize to hold whatever length string is assigned to them. A wealth of instrinsics and functions are provided to support efficient string processing. Furthermore, XBasic supports brace notation for assigning and extracting single bytes of strings efficiently. For example, a=ASC(MID$(x$,y,1)) is the QuickBASIC way to extract a single byte from string x$ . This also works in XBasic, but two faster alternatives are available, a=ASC(x$,y) , and a=x${y} . The first alternative is 10 to 50 times faster than the conventional technique, while the second is hundreds of times faster, taking only one machine cycle on some CPUs. The assignment form of brace notation is also fast, as in the x${y}=a alternative to MID$(x$,y,1)=CHR$(a).

arrays
XBasic arrays can contain variables of any data type, including strings and composite types. All arrays, even multi-dimensional arrays, can be redimensioned without altering the contents.

Furthermore, XBasic multi-dimensional arrays are tree structures. When used in conventional ways, the difference is invisible. But a wide variety of very common problems that are impossible to solve with previous BASICs, are solved simply and efficiently with XBasic tree-structure array features. There's no need to resort to addresses, pointers, indirection, or explicit memory allocation to write programs to handle arbitrarily varying quantities and types of data.