In my recent blog about free Basic and C compilers I used some technology jargon and didn’t even realize it, as I have been working with compilers and interpreters so long I’ve forgotten when I learned the differences. It was the reference to “Free BASIC Compilers and Interpreters”. So I thought I’d give some definitions here.

A search for Interpreters on Pricegrabber.com found Interpreters and Translators of languages, alas not computer languages but spoken languages. It did find plenty of Programming Language compilers though, like this Intel C++ Compiler.

Wikipedia has definitions for both Interpreters and compilers, but they could be a bit confusing for those who don’t have some familiarity with programming. The Free Online Dictionary of Computing has a simple definition for an Interpreter:
“A program which executes other programs“, which is expanded in the rest of the article, otherwise it doesn’t can be misinterpreted.

A broader definition of an interpreter would be a programming tool that interprets and executes one line of a computer program at a time.

The definition of a compiler from the Free Online Dictionary of Computing is:
“A program that converts another program from some source language (or programming language) to machine language (object code). Some compilers output assembly language which is then converted to machine language by a separate assembler.”

Large portions of the Windows operating system (both XP and Vista) are written in C and C++ which is compiled.

Posted on August 9th, 2008 by mervyn