Yes, no more machine code. Everything was to be written in BASIC. ...how we laughed at that outlandish idea. It was so obvious performance would be... well... what we have today pretty much.
IKR? If you can't hand-pick where instructions are located on the drum, you may have to use separate constants, and if that's the case what is even the point?
If you spend a few hours writing a bit of code that has to run for decades, millions or billions of times per day on hundreds of thousands or millions of machines it seems quite significant to use only the instructions needed to make it work. A few hundreds of thousands extra seems a lot. One would imagine other useful things could be done with quintillions or septillions of cycles besides saving a few development hours.
