in reply to Re: Re: How is a perl program processed ?
in thread How is a perl program processed ?
There's no sharp border between a compiler and and an interpreter.
As you said, we often think of a compiler that takes the entire
source code, and produces something else (typically, before
running it), while an interpreter just looks at a small chunk
of the source at a time, and executes that before carrying on.
But compilers typically produce output that's being "interpreted". Machine code is basically "interpreted". And a language that has the ability to use "eval", can defer most of its "compilation" to runtime, and have it compiled one chunk at a time.
I usually call a program that takes data in one format and produces equivalent data in another format a compiler. That means that 'gcc' is a compiler. But also 'dvips'. And perhaps parts of 'perl' as well, although the other format is only used internally.
Abigail
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