Yeah a lot of the early computers wouldn't have the grunt to parse into an AST. Instead they'd write bytecode, or interpret the code at runtime pretty efficie

Yeah a lot of the early computers wouldn't have the grunt to parse into an AST. Instead they'd write bytecode, or interpret the code at runtime pretty efficiently. Storing programs as bytes instead of ASCII wasn't uncommon either. (e.g. "PRINT" -> 0x02, etc). I wrote a simple BASIC interpreter for golang, and did something a little more high-level, but not by much: https://github.com/skx/gobasic https://github.com/skx/gobasic