But then you lose one of main reasons why so many programs were written in a mix of BASIC+assembly. BASIC's tokens were effectively a "virtual machine" with mor

But then you lose one of main reasons why so many programs were written in a mix of BASIC+assembly. BASIC's tokens were effectively a "virtual machine" with more functionality and a more expressive/"memory efficient" assembly language. Many of the basic programs on the apple ][ simply couldn't have been written in straight C/assembly without running out of RAM. Of course, its possible to build another virtual machine in assembly, or simply call directly into the BASIC routines in ROM, but that doesn't really buy much over just writing the application in BASIC looking for the places where BASIC is to slow, or doesn't support an operation you need and calling assembly. I remember the day I broke into Ultima and discovered that it was mostly BASIC. I was like WOW, game programmers write in basic too. It validated the way I had hacked together my own ultima clone. (many years after the initial ultima, I was to young in the early 80's to be writing code).