I wrote z80 asm from the early 80s to the early 90s and definitely never felt the need to grab for a higher level language. Friends told me to try C/Pascal, but

I wrote z80 asm from the early 80s to the early 90s and definitely never felt the need to grab for a higher level language. Friends told me to try C/Pascal, but I found them clunky, slow and inefficient. Thing is, you could not write very large programs anyway: I could get up to 128kb but it was very rare to have code that large; most of it was game data for instance. If I would have a Z80 now with megabytes of memory (which I do by the way), I would still write asm for it if the project was for fun; if it were serious, then I would try (probably) a commercial compiler. Maybe Forth, as was mentioned here; I really like Forth and use it on new embedded devices to go spelonking.