[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[Patrick]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:56:58 -0700
Deryk Barker wrote:

> John Blomfield wrote:
> > Deepan Chakravarthy wrote:
> >>
> >> Just curious.. Is Python considered a Interpreted language? then what 
> >> exactly are .pyc files ?
> >>
> > pyc files are bytecode files not binary, a platform independent code 
> > form of Python.
> >
> And bytecodes are binary.
> 
> Bytecodes are simply the machine code of a stack-based machine which 
> isn't physically present. It might be, if someone decides to build it. 
> At one point Sun were building/were planning to build a Java chip, which 
> would have had java bytecode as its machine code.
> 
> BTW the first well-known byte code system was the UCSD Pascal p-code 
> system, in the mid 70s. The idea of a bytecode goes back to Peter 
> Landin's seminal 1964 paper: A Mechanical Method for Evaluating Expressions.

Ah.  So that's where Infocom got the idea.  :-)  [Anyone remember
Bureaucracy?  Zork?  The Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy?]
Their games were built to run on a fictional `Z-Machine' so they
only had to port the interpreter to different platforms.

Trivia.  I don't expect a response to this.  But the other part,
about untyped data kind of makes sense, if/when it's true [and
I'm pretty sure it is true, in bash].



Patrick.

-- 
Alliance, n.:
	In international politics, the union of two thieves who
	have their hands so deeply inserted in each other's
	pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"