As many of you have pointed out there have been tools for generating
programs from within programs for a long time. There have also been many
programming environments which did not need a complete compiler.
To the best of my knowledge, the Microsoft .NET platform is the first
run-time environment [not development environment] in which a compiler,
linker and all of the associated capabilities are included. If you have a
windows machine [XP, 2K] and have applied the windowsupdates, then all of
these tools are already resident on your machines!