[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[Deepan Chakravarthy]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:56 PM, John Blomfield <jabfield at shaw.ca> wrote:

> My presentation "Writing programs for Linux" at last night's monthly
> meeting gave rise to some spirited discussion, when I remarked that
> compiled languages resulted in faster execution times than interpreted
> languages and tended to be preferred by programmers for larger more
> complex problems.  There were many reasons put forward as to why this
> should be and some doubted there was any significant difference in
> practice.  I was unable to answer these questions authoritatively since
> I just use a language when it suits my particular purpose and use the
> rule of thumb "big or fast program = C or C++" and "small and quick to
> write = Python, bash etc."
>
> The attached link is a result of a quick google that tends to support my
> pragmatic view of life:
> http://furryland.org/~mikec/bench/ <http://furryland.org/%7Emikec/bench/>
>
> One of the points that was discussed back and forth was the issue of
> startup time for interpreters and where discounting this would change
> the comparison.  Quoting from the above link:
>
> "Note that these tests all include the startup time for the JVM. If you
> are willing to discount startup time and focus on the time spent running
> the benchmark, you can deduct about a second from the Java scores (and
> almost nothing for Pytohn and C++)."
>
>
Just curious.. Is Python considered a Interpreted language? then what
exactly are .pyc files ?


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