On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 10:51:31 +0000, Denis McMahon wrote: > On Sun, 16 Jun 2013 12:59:00 +0300, Nick the Gr33k wrote: > >> Whats the difference of "interpreting " to "compiling" ? > > OK, I give up!
Actually, that's a more subtle question than most people think. Python, for example, is a compiled language. (What did you think the "c" in ".pyc" files stood for? and the compile() function>?) It is compiled to byte-code, which runs on a virtual machine, rather than machine-code, which runs on a physical machine. Except PyPy, which *is* compiled to machine-code. Except that it doesn't do so at compile time, but on the fly at run-time. And these days, for many types of hardware, even machine-code is often interpreted by a virtual machine on a chip. And even languages which compile to machine-code often use an intermediate platform-independent form rather than targeting pure machine-code. The line between compilers and interpreters is quite fuzzy. Probably the best definition I've seen for the difference between a modern compiler and interpreter is this one: "...the distinguishing feature of interpreted languages is not that they are not compiled, but that the compiler is part of the language runtime and that, therefore, it is possible (and easy) to execute code generated on the fly." -- Roberto Ierusalimschy, "Programming In Lua", 2nd Edition, p. 63 -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list