And Hmm. You don't care about WRITE? So in theory DATA could go in flash rather than actual EEPROM? That might make things a bit easier... Would a syntax like this be close enough to be useful:
DATASTART(label)
DATA 12, 13, 14, 15
DATAEND
DATASTART(stringlabel)
STRINGDATA("a string that has some characters in it")
DATAEND
DATASTART(anotherlabel)
DATA 65, 66, WORD(0x3738), 39
DATAEND
It wouldn't be exactly like PBASIC's DATA statement, but the idea would be that it wouldn't be TOO hard to edit some PBASIC DATA statements to fit the new syntax...
I did something a little like this for a menu library that I've been working on:
MENU_START(menu_A)
MENU_ACT('X', menu_up)
MENU_ACT('A', menu_boot)
MENU_SUB('B', menu_3deep)
MENU_END(menu_A)