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Comments on Interpreted language: What is its benefit for being written in that way ?

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Interpreted language: What is its benefit for being written in that way ?

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Whenever I search in google why a specific language is interpreted language, I get differences between compiled languages and interpreted languages but nowhere the benefit for being interpreted rather compiled. Anyone please shed some light.

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posted about 3 years ago
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aditya98‭
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Interpreters are easier to write than compilers. For this reason esoteric and toy languages are often implemented by interpretation.

But the dichotomy between interpreted and compiled languages is a false one:

  • a sufficiently popular language which initially has only an interpreter may well later gain a compiler for performance reasons (see: Python vs Cython, pypy, etc; PHP vs HHVM).
  • other popular platforms use hybrid approaches whereby source code is compiled to a bytecode for a virtual machine, and then the bytecode is interpreted or part interpreted and part JIT-compiled (see: Java, .Net).
posted about 3 years ago
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Peter Taylor‭
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FractionalRadix‭ wrote about 3 years ago
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+1 for pointing out the false dichtomy. It might be worth adding why interpreters are easier to write; e.g. no need to do register allocation.

ghost-in-the-zsh‭ wrote about 3 years ago · edited about 3 years ago
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There're some inaccuracies in the examples given. E.g., "Python vs CPython" is incorrect b/c Python is basically a language specification. CPython is not a "compiler" for Python; it's the reference runtime implementation - but it's still an interpreter, not a compiler. Another example includes IronPython, which is a .Net-based runtime.

Peter Taylor‭ wrote about 3 years ago
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@ghost-in-the-zsh, not CPython, Cython.

ghost-in-the-zsh‭ wrote about 3 years ago
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@PeterTaylor: I guess I must've misread that as CPython for some reason. My bad. Also, I didn't get a notification... I just happened to check and see your comment.