In computer programming, a compile and go system, compile, load, and go system, assemble and go system, or load and go system is a programming language processor in which the compilation, assembly, or link steps are not separated from program execution. The intermediate forms of the program are generally kept in primary memory, and not saved to the

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

. Examples of compile-and-go systems are

WATFOR WATFIV, or WATerloo FORTRAN IV, developed at the University of Waterloo, Canada is an implementation of the Fortran computer programming language. It is the successor of WATFOR. WATFIV was used from the late 1960s into the mid-1980s. WATFIV w ...

PL/C PL/C is an instructional dialect of the programming language PL/I, developed at the Department of Computer Science of Cornell University in the early 1970s in an effort headed by Professor Richard W. Conway and graduate student Thomas R. Wilcox. ...

, and

Dartmouth BASIC Dartmouth BASIC is the original version of the BASIC programming language. It was designed by two professors at Dartmouth College, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz. With the underlying Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), it offered an inte ...

. An example of a load-and-go system is the

OS/360 OS/360, officially known as IBM System/360 Operating System, is a discontinued batch processing operating system developed by IBM for their then-new System/360 mainframe computer, announced in 1964; it was influenced by the earlier IBSYS/IBJOB ...

loader, which performed many of the functions of the

Linkage Editor In computing, a linker or link editor is a computer system program that takes one or more object files (generated by a compiler or an assembler) and combines them into a single executable file, library file, or another "object" file. A simple ...

, but placed the linked program in memory rather than creating an executable on disk. Compile and go systems differ from

interpreters Interpreting is a translational activity in which one produces a first and final target-language output on the basis of a one-time exposure to an expression in a source language. The most common two modes of interpreting are simultaneous interp ...

, which either directly execute

source code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the ...

or execute an

intermediate representation An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" ...

Analysis

Advantages of compile-and-go systems are: * The user need not be concerned with the separate steps of compilation, assembling, linking, loading, and executing. * Execution speed is generally much superior to interpreted systems. * They are simple and easier to implement. Disadvantages of compile-and-go loaders are: * There is wastage in memory space due to the presence of the assembler. * The code must be reprocessed every time it is run. * Systems with multiple modules, possibly in different languages, cannot be handled naturally within this framework. Compile-and-go systems were popular in academic environments, where student programs were small, compiled many times, usually executed quickly and, once debugged, seldom needed to be re-executed.

Analysis

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