A few thoughts on interpreters vs compilers: - somewhere, there has to be an interpreter -- the x86 chip in my laptop is interpreting the x86 code that Racket generates. - there could certainly be a more direct AST-based interpreter for (fully-expanded) Racket. My work on Pycket involved writing such an interpreter, for example.
The best way to distinguish compilers from interpreters is that a compiler takes a program and produces another program, whereas an interpreter takes a program (along with some input) and produces an answer. Sam On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 12:35 PM zeRusski <vladilen.ko...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Thank you for this fantastic reply Sam! I now think I had a very naive model > of "interpreter" when I asked the question. My CS degree from the nowhere > university has it that language interpreters walk the tree and you know > "execute" be it in the host language or generating native code. I feel a bit > stupid now. Technically you're absolutely right - there is an interpreter for > the bytecode (or whatever), so duh. But there are also a bunch of compilation > steps in between. I am now completely lost as to what constitutes a compiler > and what makes an interpreter. I always thought of interpreters as something > I encountered in PLAI. I remember reading some old paper abound "fast > interpreters" and all of them implemented a virtual machine they "compiled" > to and I was lost then - how's that not a compiler - as I am lost now. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/b183ae65-524d-4e70-9bee-ce0531bf21feo%40googlegroups.com. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/CAK%3DHD%2BZ0G-iYDYAreU2qg1vC%3DDhT777%3DsE2kqT6QC0iQyD3JwQ%40mail.gmail.com.
