By executable the author actually means interpreted
Interpreted languages have their place. Basic was a good introductory teaching language in its day, as it was intended to quickly let beginners write and test their code. But only the feeble minded would have tried to use it for production coding. There are great special purpose interpreted languages like AWK that are quite good for quick and dirty one time tasks. And I'm even saying all of this as being a Forth programmer who even was on a team that implemented a Forth on the C64. (Forth actually does a lot of the "compilation" when each line or word is written, but it is still inefficient as it spends most of its time in subroutine calls and returns). But interpreted languages will always sacrifice speed, and you can write a compiler to translate any interpreted language into true machine code (although in many cases it isn't worth doing).
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