Scripting Introduction - Wizards and Warriors: Massively Multiplayer Online Game Creation - page 238

computers such as Spectrum and Commodore Vic 20, BASIC allowed many
people to make their own games and educational or business software. It
helped start the concept of the home programmer, whereby someone sitting at
home in front of his own computer could create a program and then sell it. Of
course in those days there was no Internet and so everything had to be placed
on a physical media such as a cassette tape. As technology changed and
Windows-based operating systems became the main focus for many devel-
opers, programming languages were required to compile into particular
formatsthatcouldberunonanycomputer,suchastheWindowsEXE
(executable) format.

Note

A compileris a process whereby the programming application takes the computer instructions (code)
and generates a file that can run on any computer, regardless of the tools or platform installed.

Over the last few years, some programming languages have become popular
while others have disappeared, or found small niche markets. Some languages
are better at doing a particular task, and others will work only on a particular
operating system.

Some programming languages that are in use today:

n C++: The descendant of C, which is an early programming language
from the 1970s. Various companies created their own versions of C and
C++, such as Microsoft and Borland. Today Microsoft s Visual C++ is

considered the standard for programming on a Windows computer.
Microsoft also allows you to download and install a free version of Visual
Studio, so that you can learn the programming syntax.
n C#: C# was created by Microsoft. It

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s not as fast as C++, but is used
commonly in GUI-based applications and tools as well as in the games
engine XNA from Microsoft.

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Java : Developed by Sun Microsystems, Java s main benefit is that once you

have installed the Java platform files on your operating system, you can
run any Java code. This means that code that you write is not dependant
on the particular platform. Unlike C#, which will only run on Windows,

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n