Arlet wrote:
The symbolic assembler in the Acorn Atom was less than 1KB, but since it was integrated into the BASIC ROM, it could "cheat" by calling the rest of the ROM for things like expression evaluation, which would have taken up a lot of space otherwise.
I believe this is inaccurate. The Acorn Atom assembler is not a symbolic assembler. It is a mnemonic assembler, which means that you can use mnemonics like BNE instead of coding the binary or hex value of the BRANCH NOT EQUAL (BNE) opcode. A symbolic assembler uses labels like ComputeTax instead of coding the actual memory address in hex or the offset to the memory address for short instructions. No assembler comes close to doing what The Assembler for the VIC does (or did, since it is no longer available). Thanks for your comment though. And sorry it took me so long to answer this. I didn't realize this forum or your comment even existed until today when I Googled for the article in which the interview with me was published.