From: Robert Dober Date: 2010-05-03T20:50:01+09:00 Subject: Re: Teaching Programming Languages (including Ruby) On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 12:51 PM, Samuel Williams wrote: I was reading this with quite some interest when it struck me that you might consider the audience as a tie breaker. If I understood correctly you are talking to beginners. In that case I suppose there is not really much room for sophistication. Considering that almost no interpreted language is really purely interpreted (MRI 1.8 being one of the exceptions, but one could argue that it is compiled into an AST first[1]) but compiled into some sort of bytecode first, Java clearly qualifies as an interpreted language. It is probably necessary to hide some details from the beginners. Cheers Robert [1] As a side node JRuby is a nice example of how complicated stuff can become. IIRC it is interpreting the AST, compiling hot parts into Java bytecode, and then depending on the JVM of course all sort of other optimizations (including another potential JIT) are taking place. Thus interpreted and compiled just become a matter of the viewpoint. R. -- The best way to predict the future is to invent it. -- Alan Kay