Most of the time, visual programming are programmed with text language, but sometime it is the other way around: like a text language engine implemented in a block programming environment. That is the purpose of CRIS, which means "CRIS Runs In Scratch". This is a language designed by Greg8128, "a 17 year old Scratcher who enjoys Mathematics and Computer Science". The language itself is in the C-like family, with memory management, namespace, function pointers, scope... And basic text and graphics output. According to the author, it is not the first attempt to create a text programming language from Scratch but "compared to previous attempts, CRIS is much faster and much more feature rich". Something I find very interesting here, is that a language seen as "serious" by some people ("prog lang have to be text languages") is created with a programming environment seen as a "toy" ("programming with Scratch is not real programming"). Here is the Scratch project with the compiler and the engine: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/451789561/ Here is the documentation: https://sites.google.com/view/the-cris-programming-language/documentation

The

while

statement allows code to be repeated, much like a

repeat until

block in Scratch.

Statements like this (pg 8 ) in the documentation make it seem like it may help ease Scratch programmers into mainstream text languages. Most interesting. Is it easy to see the generated Scratch program? I couldn't tell from within the Scratch project.

It doesn't generate a Scratch program. He has written a compiler/engine/interpreter of the CRIS language. I guess there is some kind of intermediate representation generated by the compiler that is used by the engine.