Interpreters and Interpreted Languages

Interpreters and Interpreted Languages

NOTE: This article is meant to be a subordinate of a main article, https://steemit.com/technology/@inputoutput/beginning-programming-with-android-c-c-php-python-java-and-javascript. If you haven't read the main article, you should consider reading it. However, if you do not wish to, you can continue with this.

As you begin to get more involved in the programming world, you will come across these two terms which are vital to understand, compiler and compiled language. In this article, I will explain these two terms as simple as possible.

A computer, be it a desktop computer, laptop, smart phone, etc, is a programmable electronic device. We can give it instruction which it carries out.

A computer does not understand typical human languages. Computers understand a gibberish language of 0s and 1s. An instruction written in a native computer language may look like this: 00001101 11011100 10010010. While this looks bizarre to you, it's what a computer takes and executes diligently.

As you can imagine, if humans are to communicate with computers like this, writing computer programs will never be easy. At your stage, the ease may be the only difficulty you may notice about this, but there are many other serious problems with it.

To overcome the problems of having to write programs in gibberish computer languages, computer scientists started developing new programming languages.

These programming languages were developed to solve the problems being faced with native computer languages. These programming languages among other things, were designed to be more comprehensible by the human brain.

However, because these programming languages bear high abstraction from native computer languages, they are called high level languages (HLL).

Not all high level languages are translated to machine language. There are some HLLs, instead of them being translated to machine language to be executed by a physical machine, they are executed directly by a software. Languages that are directly executed by softwares, are known as interpreted languages. Softwares that execute programming languages directly are known as interpreters.

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