ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

BASIC interpreter

Hello there! Today we are going to talk about something called a "basic interpreter". Have you ever played make-believe, pretending to be a teacher or a doctor, and you give instructions to your friends? Well, a basic interpreter is like a pretend teacher that speaks a special language called BASIC. BASIC is a type of computer language that people use to tell a computer what to do.

So, imagine a computer as a very fast and very smart friend. But this friend is only good at doing things that it's told to do. This is where the basic interpreter comes in! It's a program that can read what you type in, understand it, and then tell the computer what to do. Just like how you give instructions to your friends.

Let's say we want to tell the computer to add two numbers together, like 5+3. We would type that into the basic interpreter like this:

10 PRINT 5+3

And then we would press enter, and the interpreter would tell the computer to add those two numbers. The computer would then give us an answer, which would look something like this:

8

The interpreter helps the computer understand what we want it to do, even though we're not speaking in its language.

So, in summary, a basic interpreter is a program that can read and understand a special computer language called BASIC, and it helps the computer understand what we want it to do. It's like a pretend teacher that speaks computer!