Interpreters of various types have also been constructed for many languages traditionally associated with compilation, such as Algol, Fortran, Cobol, C and C++. Some systems, such as Smalltalk and contemporary versions of BASIC and Java may also combine two and three. Source programs are compiled ahead of time and stored as machine independent code, which is then linked at run-time and executed by an interpreter and/or compiler (for JIT systems). Perl, Python, MATLAB, and Ruby are examples of the second, while UCSD Pascal is an example of the third type. Explicitly execute stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system.Įarly versions of Lisp programming language and minicomputer and microcomputer BASIC dialects would be examples of the first type.Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this.Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly.An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution: In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. Program that executes source code without a separate compilation step
