I know there are easy ways (eg bascat) to turn the BBC's binary shorthand BASIC into normal ASCII, but is there a way to turn ASCII BASIC into something you can read into the BBC? Or will I have to do all BASIC editing (for things like BASIC loaders, etc) in an emulator?

The BBC (or emulator) can take a text file and convert it the BBC BASIC. Presuming your text file is called 'text' on an ssd disk and loaded into an emulator etc.

The first line of the text file should be

AUTO

Then you can just have the rest of your program

on the Beeb when you've put the text file onto ssd

type

*TYPE TEXT

and it'll go in with line numbers etc.

Then just re save as a BSIC program.

*EXEC surely? *TYPE will just dump it to the screen.

lol

Using the sample tokenisation code at http://mdfs.net/Info/Comp/BBCBasic/ProgTips/ you can write a program that reads in a text file and outputs a tokenised BASIC file.