Interpreter (computing)

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.

An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:

• Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly;
• Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation or object code and immediately execute that;
• Explicitly execute stored precompiled bytecode made by a compiler and matched with the interpreter Virtual Machine.

Here example how Python does it:

References

• Crafting Interpreters