"Tim Roberts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] | Well, I'm being a bit argumentative here, but it's hard to deny that the | use of "compiled" in the context of .pyc (or .javac) is very different from | the use of "compiled" in the context of running gcc.
Besides the fact that the object code does not corresponded to the public interface of any *current* processor, the compilation process is quite similar. Linear source code is parsed using standard techniques to produce a syntax tree. The tree is walked to produce object code in a different language. A certain amount of optimization is done. For instance, CPython compiles a 'while ' statement to a conditional jump past the end before the body and an absolute jump to the begining at the end. I am quite sure that gcc does essentially the same thing. If CPython (by 2.4, at least) recognizes the condition as a constant whose Bool value is True, it removes (optimizes away) the loading of the constant and the conditional jump that would never happen. Again, this is the same as gcc will do, I am sure, with at least some flag settings. | Once upon a time, | Basic enthusiasts would have used the word "tokenized" to describe .pyc files. Perhaps, but they would, I think, have been wrong. Tokenized Basic to the best of my knowledge, is a reversibly compressed version of the source file. The 'while' keyword, is there is one, is replaced by a number, but no parsing is done. Terry Jan Reedy -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
