Interpreter
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An Interpreter is a program that parses and executes a programming language on the fly without converting it to binary executable code. The program the interpreter executes is usually stored as plain text although other formats are possible.
This is in contrast to a compiler that converts the whole source code from human readable instructions directly to machine language executables. In most cases the line between "interpreted" and "compiled" languages is very clear. Most language implementations are either one or the other. There are some exceptions to this rule, most notably Forth, which is effectively both compiled and interpreted. Another exception is Java, where the compilation generates pseudo code that is interpreted by a virtual machine engine, which runs on the particular device being used. Also many modern scripting languages (Perl, Python etc.) have a just-in-time pre-compiler stage followed by the interpretation stage which executes the generated pseudo code. However, they are generally regarded as interpreter languages anyway.
The best known interpreted language of the 8-bit era was BASIC. From the late 1970s through most of the 1980s nearly every computer had its own version of BASIC stored in ROM. As mentioned above they commonly used some condensed (tokenized) format to save space and to accelerate interpretation.
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Wikipedia: Interpreter_(computing) |
