Dave Smith's Blog

What’s the difference between writing a compiler and writing an interpreter?

Easy:

Writing an interpreter is like reading an instruction manual and performing the steps.

Writing a compiler is like reading an English instruction manual, translating it into German, and handing it to a German person to execute the steps.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2012 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Code and Cruft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.