Harvard vs. vonNeuman

David> As many of you have pointed out there have been tools for David> generating programs from within programs for a long David> time. There have also been many programming environments which David> did not need a complete compiler. David> To the best of my knowledge, the Microsoft .NET platform is David> the first run-time environment [not development environment] David> in which a compiler, linker and all of the associated David> capabilities are included. If you have a windows machine [XP, David> 2K] and have applied the windowsupdates, then all of these David> tools are already resident on your machines! You mean -- as opposed to having to install a developer's package for it? If that's what you mean, then the answer is no, not by many decades. Unix boxes pretty much uniformly come with all that. BASIC systems always had it, as did LISP boxes, or FORTH systems. All that goes back to the 1970s if not before. And of course, any large machine (timesharing or batch) has always had all this stuff as a matter of course. The closest you might come is that some of these systems would offer some languages standard, and some as extra cost options. Developer's kits are largely a PC invention, I would say. paul