I think so. Wirth called out Fortran's lack of pointers, records, and recursion. You have (or can fake) all of these things in assembly. Recursion is particular

I think so. Wirth called out Fortran's lack of pointers, records, and recursion. You have (or can fake) all of these things in assembly. Recursion is particularly important for building a compiler, since much of it involves manipulating trees. Also, consider the stated goal of the project. They wanted to write a throwaway compiler so that they could bootstrap a Pascal version. In this case, it's a bad choice to use a language (Fortran) that's so different from Pascal. On the other hand, assembly is very flexible, so you can use whatever idioms you think will apply in the Pascal code you later intend to write. This will make the translation much simpler.