Interpreter Software System

An Interpreter Software System is a software program that can run an interpreted programming language program.

• • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Program Compiler Software System.
• See: Interpreted Programming Language, Virtual Machine.

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References

2013

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreter_%28computing%29
  • In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that executes, i.e. performs, instructions written in a programming language. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:
    1. parse the source code and perform its behavior directly
    2. translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this
    3. explicitly execute stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system
  • Early versions of the Lisp programming language and Dartmouth BASIC would be examples of the first type. Perl, Python, MATLAB, and Ruby are examples of the second, while UCSD Pascal is an example of the third type. Source programs are compiled ahead of time and stored as machine independent code, which is then linked at run-time and executed by an interpreter and/or compiler (for JIT systems). Some systems, such as Smalltalk, contemporary versions of BASIC, Java and others may also combine two and three.

    While interpretation and compilation are the two main means by which programming languages are implemented, they are not mutually exclusive, as most interpreting systems also perform some translation work, just like compilers. The terms “interpreted language” or “compiled language” signify that the canonical implementation of that language is an interpreter or a compiler, respectively. A high level language is ideally an abstraction independent of particular implementations.

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