What ? Command-by-command ? No interpreter is using such crappy technique nowadays. --Taw
Could you elaborate ? --Taw
Every time a perl script is run, Perl compiles it and then runs the compiled code. At least, this is the usual way of using perl, although it's not the only way. --Zundark, 2001 Dec 15
You mean compile to syntactic tree or compile to machine code ? --Taw
An interpreted language is a type of programming language that is not compiled? into [machine code]?, but is interpreted at run-time by the computer, and translated into machine understandable code as required.
It is often a mistake to refer to a language as either "interpreted" or "compiled", because most languages can be implemented in either way, and some languages (like Perl) are compiled at runtime but behave as if they were interpreted. Other languages, like Java, may be partially compiled into an intermediate form which is then interpreted (although that, too, might be compiled). Some languages, though, are specifically designed to favor interpretation.
An example of an interpreted language is JavaScript.