The 8051-basic was a moderate success.  A microcontroller with a
full-ish basic in ROM/EPROM capable of running a basic program
that had been entered via console or stored in (external) eprom.

You'd think that with more modern microcontrollers, this sort of
thing would be a natural "reference design" to demonstrate processor
capabilities, in much the same way that some version of linux ends
up ported to larger systems.  Further, you'd think that with the
bigger, faster 8051 variants out there, AT LEAST those would appear
with self-contained basic interpreters.  Yet with the possible
exception of the Atom from basicmicro, all I see is modules (at
several times the price of bare chips), and all commercial rather
than "chip selling aid" style freeware.

Where is basicAVR, basic18f, basicARM, and all the other variants.
Where is the open-source high-level language chipscale basic
interpreter, easy to port to your choice of micro/storage/comm
combination with only minor amounts of custom work?

Or was this never as popular as it seemed in the first place?

BillW
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