[tluyben2]

In old 8-bit Basic it was, many times, a kind of battle between interpreter and assembly. I would write things in Basic, then see if it was fast enough. If it was not it usually was pretty obvious where the issue was; if the code was complex I would rewrite it to a version that more or less would convert to assembly naturally and then test again. You would have to lose basic pretty quickly especially for games, so in the end (of the 80s basically) I started straight in assembly. And that is what I missed and found again now in limited resource embedded chip programming; doing almost all the actual work in your head and on paper instead of trial and error everything.