Keep in mind that this was an article in a magazine and the entire compiler had to fit in there, so that was also a limiting factor. Here is the BYTE issue wit

Keep in mind that this was an article in a magazine and the entire compiler had to fit in there, so that was also a limiting factor. Here is the BYTE issue with the compiler (the p-code vm is given in the previous issue): https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1978-10/1978_10_BYTE_03-10_Chess_for_the_Microcomputer#page/n35/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1978-10/1978_10_BYT... If you take a look at the BASIC source of the compiler and the Pascal source example, i think it becomes immediately obvious that the latter was a little nicer to write stuff in regardless of limitations :-P. EDIT: the compiler also seems to support direct memory access via a special `MEM[expression]` syntax (implemented in lines 3130 for reading and 4640 for writing). Considering that those computers allowed free reign over the entire system via memory accesses, this alone would be enough to implement more complex stuff wrapped around nice functions.