[BadThink6655321]

You are confusing theory with practice. Back then, computers were expensive and rare. The general student population at my university had two choices: the CDC 6400, or an HP time-sharing system that ran BASIC. A friend and I actually wrote a complete toolset in BASIC that allowed students to learn HP-2100 assembly language. (I did the editor and assembler, he did the emulator and debugger). But writing a PASCAL cross-compiler in BASIC, that output a paper tape of COMPASS, or binary? No way. Or FORTRAN, SNOBOL, Algol, ...

[mark-r]

I learned FORTRAN on a HP 2000C timesharing system, using a FORTRAN emulator written in BASIC. It was dog slow, but it worked. I have no idea where the emulator came from.