The one thing I lamented about the Apple II Plus (vs. the original with Integer BASIC) was that to make room for autostart, they had to rip out the mini-assembler in the Monitor ROM. That was the closest thing I ever saw to an assembly-language REPL before this. At least they were able to keep the disassembler.
The BBC Micro and the Atom that came before it had an assembler built into BASIC. Just think, in the early 80s you could do inline assembly if your BASIC code wasn't fast enough...
13 year old me had a box of cassette tapes with index labels like "0 DEBUG", and "10 ASS", and "28 MEMHAK", "30 UNDEL", and so on, where the #'s were the position - on tape - of the little bundle of utilities I would auto-load as soon as I got home from school, while having dinner, etc. I spent days, dreaming of having a ROM burner to put all these things in the last (usable) 16k address space of things ..
flyinghamster · · focus · HN ↗
ErroneousBosh · · focus · HN ↗
MomsAVoxell · · focus · HN ↗