Given the fact that you need a special editor and program to use the chip, I'd say the BASIC is being compiled. so from that point of view the basic is just an abstraction of the underlying chipset.

The ARM series of processors are well known for having a bit of grunt and enough memory to do some tricky stuff with. They can be programmed in C.

At the really low end there are the legendary 'PIC' chips, available from many electronics retailers. They are programmed in assembler and only have a few hundred bytes of memory.

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.