From: leathm AT solwarra DOT gbrmpa DOT gov DOT au (Leath Muller) Message-Id: <199705300416.OAA20466@solwarra.gbrmpa.gov.au> Subject: Re: Demos (Was How the Quake source got out) To: adalee AT sendit DOT sendit DOT nodak DOT edu (Adam) Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 14:16:50 +1000 (EST) Cc: bryan DOT murphy AT hcst DOT com, djgpp AT delorie DOT com In-Reply-To: from "Adam" at May 29, 97 10:52:08 pm Content-Type: text Precedence: bulk > 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.