First, BASIC51 is not the pre-tokenized version, it comes complete with a single-line editor (it would be nice to add assembler but not in the single-line form, but runtime assembled - in the way it was implemented in the Acorn Archimedes' Basic).

I think Steve's point was that the feeling of BASIC51 to is similar - the entire "intelligence" is sitting inside the '51, so a dumb terminal is enough to make it working.

But, Richard, frankly, the time you spent explaining your view here, wouldn't that be enough to write at least the skeleton of the debugger in C?

Jan Waclawek