From: Evan Koblentz <evan@snarc.net>
Was it normal to go from BASIC directly to assembly (is BASIC enough preparation), or were people better off getting some in-between experience with a language such as Pascal or something else?
As with most things, that depends. One runs into the limits of BASIC pretty quickly. In the world I was in back in those days (mostly 808x/Z-80/TRS-80/CP/M), people seemed to pretty quickly bifurcate from BASIC to either assembly or (usually Turbo) Pascal. I was in the later category, FWIW. Other than figuring out Z-80 asm well enough to cobble together custom CP/M BDOS and other components, I lived in Turbo Pascal. But then, it was dirt cheap. If it was more expensive (see: Pascal/MT), I might have been on a different path. KJ