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Comment by chriswarbo | Hacker News Reader

I'm not an iPad user, but hasn't Apple had a long-running policy of forbidding any app which includes an interpreter?

I've seen this being mentioned for years by various programming communities (e.g. Squeak Smalltalk), where the only work around is to buy a Mac, buy OSX, buy the Apple developer tools ("Xcode"?) and pay a $99 subscription fee in order to transfer your own app to your own iPad.

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> I'm not an iPad user, but hasn't Apple had a long-running policy of forbidding any app which includes an interpreter?

That policy was rescinded almost 6 years ago: http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/app_store_guidelines and had been instituted only a few months earlier: http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/why_apple_changed_section_...

IIRC there's a policy against running downloaded code (at least automatically downloaded code) in anything but the bundled JS runtime, but bundling an interpreter in an application and running user-provided code is not an issue. You can run a Python app on iOS (e.g. via Kivy) and there are Python interpreters in the appstore.

> buy the Apple developer tools ("Xcode"?)

That's free (with a mac and OSX obviously): https://itunes.apple.com/app/xcode/id497799835

> and pay a $99 subscription fee in order to transfer your own app to your own iPad.

The developer account is only necessary to publish in the store, since Xcode7 and iOS9 you can sideload applications with a regular appleid: http://www.howtogeek.com/230225/how-to-sideload-apps-onto-an...

To be clear, you can sideload to a device without paying, but you still can't use all the features. If you want to make an app that uses App Groups, for example, you have to have a paid account. There's no way to even test it without paying your annual Software Development Tax.

I don't understand why this has been downvoted so aggressively. I didn't say anything inaccurate. You can't develop an app that uses App Groups without a paid developer program account. You can't even test such an app locally on a simulator without a paid account.

I think your info is a bit outdated (and some incorrect). Buy a mac (or ignore the Eula and run OS X in a VM), install the dev tools (free), install the app on your iPad (free). If you want to publish, there's a fee (per year).

They don't forbid interpreters. But they forbid downloading code into these interpreters.

Ie running what the user types is OK.

(At least as far as I remember.)

Your free to down load code now, many of the interrperters come with build in support for version control now.

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