Oh, thanks, I guess I misread it. I wrote a crude assembler in Pascal once (for fun). It didn't need a heap, it was all static allocation and stack - it didn't

Oh, thanks, I guess I misread it. I wrote a crude assembler in Pascal once (for fun). It didn't need a heap, it was all static allocation and stack - it didn't cross my mind that one might write an assembler that needs to do heap allocation. I was a callow youth, and probably didn't know what a heap was! The only storage you need other than stack is for a symbol table. In the general case, you can't know in advance how big that's going to be, so I suppose heap allocation for the symbol table makes sense.