[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[John Blomfield]

Deepan Chakravarthy wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:56 PM, John Blomfield <jabfield at shaw.ca 
> <mailto: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 ?
>
pyc files are bytecode files not binary, a platform independent code 
form of Python.

John
>
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