[java] Compiled vs. Interpreted Languages

From http://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-compiled-and-interpreted-programming-languages

There is no difference, because “compiled programming language” and “interpreted programming language” aren’t meaningful concepts. Any programming language, and I really mean any, can be interpreted or compiled. Thus, interpretation and compilation are implementation techniques, not attributes of languages.

Interpretation is a technique whereby another program, the interpreter, performs operations on behalf of the program being interpreted in order to run it. If you can imagine reading a program and doing what it says to do step-by-step, say on a piece of scratch paper, that’s just what an interpreter does as well. A common reason to interpret a program is that interpreters are relatively easy to write. Another reason is that an interpreter can monitor what a program tries to do as it runs, to enforce a policy, say, for security.

Compilation is a technique whereby a program written in one language (the “source language”) is translated into a program in another language (the “object language”), which hopefully means the same thing as the original program. While doing the translation, it is common for the compiler to also try to transform the program in ways that will make the object program faster (without changing its meaning!). A common reason to compile a program is that there’s some good way to run programs in the object language quickly and without the overhead of interpreting the source language along the way.

You may have guessed, based on the above definitions, that these two implementation techniques are not mutually exclusive, and may even be complementary. Traditionally, the object language of a compiler was machine code or something similar, which refers to any number of programming languages understood by particular computer CPUs. The machine code would then run “on the metal” (though one might see, if one looks closely enough, that the “metal” works a lot like an interpreter). Today, however, it’s very common to use a compiler to generate object code that is meant to be interpreted—for example, this is how Java used to (and sometimes still does) work. There are compilers that translate other languages to JavaScript, which is then often run in a web browser, which might interpret the JavaScript, or compile it a virtual machine or native code. We also have interpreters for machine code, which can be used to emulate one kind of hardware on another. Or, one might use a compiler to generate object code that is then the source code for another compiler, which might even compile code in memory just in time for it to run, which in turn . . . you get the idea. There are many ways to combine these concepts.

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