Basic?

[Scriptr]

Recently I got into a discussion with my uncle, who was a professional in the computer science field back when programming was done in Assembler.

He says that Bill Gates wishes he had written all of his operating systems in BASIC instead of C.

(BASIC was interpreted as referring to Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, not Visual Basic. This might have been wrong in itself, but that is not where the subject led or where the main question lies.)

I believe that BASIC is simply not an option for OS development because of how the language works.

Obviously, one of us has to be wrong.

His argument is that BASIC is equal to C in level (i.e., number of steps from code to executable) where as I believed that it was a closer equal to BASH; an interpreted language.

I was willing to believe that he was right, so I did some research, but I have seen the running device for BASIC referred to as a compiler in some places and as an interpreter in another place.

What is the correct answer, and (if necessary), why?