Python Interpreter question.

[Jeremy Bowers]

On Tue, 07 Sep 2004 12:56:40 -0400, Roy Smith wrote:
> Whether you want to call this "interpreted" or "compiled" is, I 
> suppose, a matter of personal opinion.

It is, for some suitable (but widely-agreed upon) definitions of those
words, both.

It is compiled into a form that is then interpreted.

Suitable definitions, for instance:

* Compile: To take some semantic meaning in one format (.py Python source
files) and convert it to some other format (.pyc compiled source) with
equivalent semantics. (This is a very general definition.)
* Interpret: To run a program not encoded in the native binary format of
the processor executing the program by providing it with a virtual machine
to run on that executes the program.

Java, .NET, and a lot of other things work this way now. The day is
rapidly approaching, if not already here, where rejecting "interpreted"
languages is to reject the majority of running code as "not real code".