Learn the most popular programming language of the most popular Operating System: Windows

Ad

Interpreted or Compiled Languages

Computer languages can be interpreted or compiled.  An interpreter executes a program, while a compiled language uses a compiler to translate the high-level language into machine language.  Visual Basic is now both an interpreted language and a compiled language.  The developer has a choice when creating a Visual Basic executable whether to make a compiled program or an interpreted program.  You will create both types of programs here.

The main advantage of an interpreted language is immediate response.  Program development often goes faster because the code instructions can be easily modified and immediately tested without being compiled (or translated) first.  This saves you considerable time in writing and testing a program.  The main disadvantage of an interpreted program is speed of execution – especially in processor-intensive instructions.  An interpreted program must translate instructions each time a program is run.  This is not required of a compiled program.

The advent of compilation in Visual Basic 5 has dramatically sped up numeric calculations and most other computations.  The speed by which forms now load into memory in Visual Basic 5 is one of the language’s more dramatic speed improvements.  But compilation alone does not guarantee speed.  Design of a program is one of the more important determinants of performance.  Visual Basic programs, whether they are interpreted or compiled, rely upon other runtime libraries of functions in order to execute.  These libraries are probably the largest factor in Visual Basic performance.

Share:

1 comment:

  1. Hi there! Is it alright if I go a bit off topic? I'm trying to read your site on my new iPad but it doesn't display properly, any suggestions? Cheers! Donetta

    ReplyDelete

Popular Posts

Search This Blog

Powered by Blogger.

Featured Post

Coded Statements and Methods

In the preceding procedure , you wrote several coded instructions, which introduced two different programming statements and a method: the D...

Recent Posts