[ataylor284_]

You're probably right. There's a lot of code for those processors that's not going away.

Too bad though, the 6809 is the pinnacle of 8-bit CPU architecture. It's the result of analyzing the practical shortcomings of the 6800 and other CPUs and redesigning the ISA. It has 16-bit index registers and 16-bit arithmetic, addressing two of the 6502s most annoying drawbacks. Additionally, it has support for stack based locals, position independent code and a LEA instruction. All those make building a high level language compiler much easier than other 8-bits.