Gday Melanie
I just read this post and found it quite interesting.
On 6mar2004 i posted on the Picbasic Pro forum, re Accessing the PICs ports in subroutines.
Particularly the ability to access ports not covered by the std 0..15 references.
I never found anything on this in the manual, but it meant i could put direct port addressing into subroutines, by always addressing the required port relative to porta.0 .
Maybe you could modify this post to include access to ports by the referential aliasing method as well?
Just a thought.
Andrew