CompuServe Thread

>>>Jerry>>> This is just a preliminary question. Back in the old days of Basic, I learned that an "intrepretive" language was one that executed commands one at a time in sequence, as differentiated from one that utilized a compiler. Your description seems to straddle these descriptions. Can you help straighten me out? Thanks as ever. Sure. Intepretive languages _are_ languages that execute commands one at a time. Each line of the text file "source code" we created is evaluated by the program and executed. The program is never compiled as a whole though. We use Animator Pro's own internal ability to read text lines of code, execute them one by one and compile internally if needed. BASIC has also evolved. GW was interpretive, VBas3 comes with a compiler to create standalone executables which use Dynamic Link Libraries. All languages process a single command at a time (unless you're on dual-processing platforms or multi-processing platforms), but whether the source code is translated into machine language at runtime or not varies. Therefore, we can't say anymore that a certain language either is or isn't Interpretive as there are both flavors of most of them now. For those programs (like Animator Pro and AutoCAD) which can use text files and run C or LISP programs without any external compiling, we say thay they are Interpretive. <<<Jerry<<<