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From: Ludovic Brenta <ludovic@ludovic-brenta.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Interpreted vs. Compiled
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:06:05 +0200
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Date: 2010-03-29T22:06:05+02:00
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I do not think any language can be said to be "interpreted" or
"compiled".  Instead, any *implementation* of any language can be
"interpreted", "compiled" or something in between.  It is almost a
continuum.

Interpreted, stricto sensu, means that the interpreter reads the sources
of the program as written by the human programmer.

In between: byte-code compilers, P-Code.

Just-in-time compilers usually compile byte-code to native processor
code on the fly.

Compiled means that the hardware processors runs the program directly,
even if, inside the hardware, some additional transformations can take
place for efficiency.

Some implentations of BASIC are interpreted, others are compiled.

Some implementations of Lisp are interpreted (emacs lisp), others are
byte-compiled (also emacs lisp), others still are compiled (GNU Common
Lisp).

Some implementations of Java are byte-compiled (Sun Java compiler),
others still are compiled (GCC).

Even one implementation of Ada, Ada/Ed, was interpreted!

You get the drift.

-- 
Ludovic Brenta.