Not at all! If you were writing BASIC, you had 38911 bytes available. BUT, page 0 had a control byte that let you turn on/off the various ROM banks, making the "shadowed" RAM accessible.

So if you bypassed all the "shadowed" ROM, including the 8K BASIC ROM, you had 64K available.

Anyway, taking that 8K of RAM that was hidden by BASIC, and writing a poor man's Perl, what would you be able to accomplish?

Assuming I can create and manage a primitive symbol table, then I've also got hashmaps, and in a pinch I therefore also have arrays.

The trick is not doing it RIGHT the first time, but just DOING it.