Hi everyone, welcome back. Interpreters and compilers are used to translate high-level programming languages into low-level assembly language. This translation step is an important step to understanding how a computer processes a program. In this article, we will discuss the differences between an interpreter and a compiler.
High-Level Languages
Many common programming languages such as Java, Python, and C, are all considered high-level programming languages. The reason we have these languages is because it’s human readable and makes it easy to develop in. Our codebase then gets translated by either an interpreter or a compiler into a computer language that the computer can understand and run instructions off of. The computer language is not human readable which is why we have interpreters, compilers, and high level languages.
Interpreter
An interpreter runs a program or script without first converting the high-level code into assembly code and because of this, interpreted languages tend to run slower than compiled languages. The source code is required for the program to run. Instructions are translated from the high-level program as a program is running. Some examples of interpreted languages include Python, and Perl.
