That's true. I was mainly thinking of a struggle I had trying to create a binary .com file containing ML. The BASIC had no function for writing an arbitrary bin

That's true. I was mainly thinking of a struggle I had trying to create a binary .com file containing ML. The BASIC had no function for writing an arbitrary binary file. In hindsight, I suppose you could use one of those ML techniques you mentioned to do file I/O but that would have seemed out of reach in difficulty to me as a teenager.