Absolutely loved when I randomly caught an episode of Computer Chronicles back in the old time days.
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Yes, there are quite a few videos on YouTube about him, named “The man who should have been Bill Gates” but that’s just click baiting. Watch the special episode of “The Computer Chronicles” about Gary Kildall and see what his friends and business associates say about him.
Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal. Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later.
> He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers.
No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh.
> Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch.
He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when Allen was battling cancer.
D's compile time function execution engine works that way. So does the Javascript compiler/interpreter engine I wrote years ago, and the Java compiler I wrote eons ago.
The purpose to going all the way to generating machine code is the result often runs 10x faster.
Um, no? your experience is probably at least two decades after the time period in question.. The more advanced versions of, for example, the TRS-80 BASIC (part of this "microcomputer BASICs that all share a common set of bugs") did no more than tokenize - so, `10 PRINT "Hello"` would have a binary representation for the line number, a single byte token for PRINT, then " H E L L O " and an end-of-line marker. Actually interpreting the code involved just reading it linearly; GOTO linenumber involved scanning the entire code in memory for that line number (and yes, people really did optimize things by putting GOTO and GOSUB targets earlier in the program so the interpreter would find them faster :-)
It's a VM of a sort, and the p-code the VM executes is tokenized input.
The BASIC interpreter doesn't recognize `3+x*(2+y)` nor does it compile it instead it evaluates that expression using a pair of stacks. You've expanded the definition of compilation to cover almost all computation. It's compilers all the way down to the electrons.