[Coco] Happy Birthday BASIC!

[James Ross]

Salvador Garcia wrote:
> ...
> Other reasons why it was looked down upon:
> 1. It was interpreted... making it slow...
> 2. It had line numbers...
> 3. It was not structured...
> 4. It had the GOTO statement...

I agree w/ #1 being the #1 reason  

> ... (VB.NET & C#) ironically, both of these languages are interpreted ...

Slight correction.  They are both compiled to “Intermediate Language” IL or MSIL.  This is very similar in concept to Java bytecode.  

The IL (even though it could theoretically be interpreted) then is converted to native machine code at the time the code is executed through a process called JIT (Just-In-Time compile) on the platform you are running it on.  Same thing w/ modern Java.  I think early on Java bytecode was interpreted, but not these days. 

Speaking in general terms and depending on the code, JIT can produce executable code that rivals C/C++ in speed (with C/C++ having the edge for sure, but when talking GHz speeds, the difference is usually negligible) – that is the reason you just don’t see business code written in C/C++ anymore.  

As pointed out in another message, JavaScript, Perl, Python, Php, Ruby out-of-the-box are indeed interpreted – but even w/ those there are trends of moving towards JIT’ing systems … 

James