Sven Krasser's Blog

The C64’s user interface is Commodore BASIC v2, which presents itself without delay as a REPL the instant the machine is powered on. BASIC lives in 8 KB of ROM of 6502 machine code. Michael Steil has worked on collecting versions of the BASIC source for various 8-bit platforms, putting them into a single source tree, and adding comments. There’s also EhBASIC by Lee Davidson, a popular BASIC interpreter used by a number of 6502-based homebrew computers. EhBASIC fits into 10 KB.

There were other interpreted languages available for the C64, e.g. LISP dialects such as LISP 64 (page in German). From a glance at the screenshots, LISP 64 is delivered as a 52-block large PRG file, so about 13 KB in size.

With scripting on resource-deprived microcontrollers becoming more popular, I was wondering if there are also new options for 6502-based systems. Alas, languages like MicroPython still require at least hundreds of KB of memory for the interpreter. Then, I came across an excellent blog post by Serge Zaitsev who was evidently on a similar mission in 2016.