Microcomputers with built-in compilers?

[EdS]

I’m not Gordon, but I do have an opinion! For me, the program text might have some reason to have trailing zeros: 2.50 for example. So, although the value can round-trip, it still needs to have the text version saved.

I rather like the approach mentioned elsewhere:

@NoLand

What the Grundy BASIC does, is preserving the source text as-is, but, once a line is encountered, its interpreted version is cached (e.g., on a kind of heap) and a link to the cached version is attached to the source line for further use. Should the system run short on memory, parts of the cache can be purged easily

(This approach doesn’t rule out tokenising keywords as a matter of course, but it can do more than that, for example converting expressions to a ready-to-evaluate form, perhaps RPN.)