Talk:MBASIC

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Interpreter versus compiler

See Interpreter. MBASIC was never described as anything but an interpreter in any literature I recall. While some steps of compilation are similar to those of an interpreter, it needlessly confuses the article to rehash that here. Pragmatically, BASCOM was the compiler. Encyclopedias should never say things like "but that is not strictly true" unless it's a direct quote, or, possibly and exceptionally, followed by a good explanation. --Wtshymanski (talk) 13:42, 6 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Interpreter_(computing) is the current link. See the Bytecode interpreters section: "There is a spectrum of possibilities between interpreting and compiling ...". MBASIC is a tokenized basic as is GWBASIC. This similar to JAVA being compiled for a JAVA virtual machine. If you save an MBASIC program and do not specify save as ASCII, you are saving the tokenized version.

You are correct about the description in the literature. The literature did not portray an accurate distinction, especially since it was widely recognized that UCSD Pascal "compiled to a P-machine". Madkaugh (talk) 21:40, 23 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]