It only recently struck me, watching Ben Eater's new videos, that BASIC can almost be thought of as high-level assembly. That's why it was so popular in the ear

It only recently struck me, watching Ben Eater's new videos, that BASIC can almost be thought of as high-level assembly. That's why it was so popular in the early days of personal computing (look at all the articles here), that's why you can have a BASIC interpreter that fits in a couple kilobytes of ROM. It's a relatively light abstraction layer over what the computer can do, plus some I/O functions.