Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Users Search
Help Dashboard Sign In Sign Up
Q&A Code Reviews Meta
Q&A
Posts Tags Edits
Ask Question

Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

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

Parent

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

+6
−0

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.

interpreted-language compiled-language
posted over 3 years ago
user card
aditya98‭
77 reputation 7 0 8 1
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.
Why should this post be closed?

0 comment threads

Post
+6
−0

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 over 3 years ago
user card
Peter Taylor‭
1302 reputation 7 34 141 7
History
Why does this post require attention from curators or moderators?
You might want to add some details to your flag.

1 comment thread

General comments (4 comments)
General comments
FractionalRadix‭ wrote over 3 years ago
copy link

+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 over 3 years ago · edited over 3 years ago
copy link

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 over 3 years ago
copy link

@ghost-in-the-zsh, not CPython, Cython.

ghost-in-the-zsh‭ wrote over 3 years ago
copy link

@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.