On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 4:39 AM, David Gesswein via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I think this was common. You would start learning assmelby and making little routines to call from Basic to do things that couldn't be done in Basic or were too slow.
That was my progression as well (BASIC to assembly). Given the constraints of the personal computers in the late 70s, there weren't too many other options. Our school had a UCSD Pascal compiler for our IMSAI 8080 but it took forever to compile anything. BASIC and assembly are actually similar in that they are both very simple and unstructured languages, where most control flow is done with either goto (jmp) or gosub (jsr). Mostly what you'll miss from BASIC is easy string manipulation and for/next loops.