Mail Archives: djgpp/1997/05/30/00:21:29
> I guess we have different definitions on interpretation... Well, maybe I
> should just be more specific... BASIC is considered an interpreted
> language, in that it interprets the actual code that you write, it doesn't
> compile it into something else first... That's how interpreted languages
> work... QuakeC is parsed and compiled into something that is, for all
> intentive purposes, illegible to the standard human.
Ok, my definition of compiled is the process of compiling a program into
a lower level language which can then be executed on the destination
architecture without external intervention...
QuakeC compiled into the byte codes _cannot_ run by themselves. They require
another program to interpret them and then run the result (as in old version
of non-compiled BASIC, new version _are_ compiled) aka Quake.
The idea is that interpreted code can be run independent of each architecture,
as a standard Microsoft BASIC should be able to run in independent arch's...
A perfect example is JAVA...
Even in the case of BASIC, the original code such as a print is converted
into a token value. You can't understand what each token does, which makes the
code unreadable to a 'standard human', yet those tokens are interpreted
by a BASIC interpreter exactly the same way as Quake interprets byte-coded
data from a compiled QuakeC program...
Its basic first year Comp Sci... maybe you should look it up??? :)
Leathal.
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