Indeed, my assumption has always been that the purpose of having an assembler integrated into BASIC was to allow for mixed language programming, i.e. writing the majority of a program in BASIC and then writing a few, performance critical routines in assembler and having the source code of the whole thing in one place. When the program is run, it can assemble the bit written in assembler and immediately start using it.Not that I know the internals well, but the assembler in BBCSDL is designed to develop code for the running system. All of the BBCSDL targets are at least 32 bit, so the older chips wouldn't be useful for it.
At least in the 8-bit era, I have not seen anything to suggest Acorn used the BASIC assembler to develop their own software written in assembler even for the same machine. Things such as the OS, BASIC interpreter and DFS were written to use MASM (the Acorn one, not the Microsoft one).
Statistics: Posted by Coeus — Fri Apr 25, 2025 1:30 pm