It was just brilliant being able to drop down a gear and do stuff in the Assembler. You still had access to all the trimmings. Not that BBC BASIC was written b

It was just brilliant being able to drop down a gear and do stuff in the Assembler. You still had access to all the trimmings. Not that BBC BASIC was written badly and needing extra assembler stuff. Commodore people had to poke obscure data into obscure places for things that should have been in BASIC. On the Sinclair machines you were using REM/CODE statements to store HEX, so you would need to look up the hex codes for all your commands and then type them in. So much to get wrong! So no, the BBC was in its on league. A parallel today is browsers. Remember when Internet Explorer did not have dev tools? Or when you needed Firebug for Firefox? Chrome came along with proper dev tools, changing all that. I think that the BBC BASIC was analogous to that. I am glad I was not alone in finding the PC experience after the arcade grade instant-on performance of the BBC. I didn't get Pascal but Wordwise takes me down memory lane. You had some fine ROMS... All bank switchable of course.