[Discuss] Interpreters vs Compilers

[Deryk Barker]

John Blomfield wrote:
> Deepan Chakravarthy wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
And bytecodes are binary.

Bytecodes are simply the machine code of a stack-based machine which 
isn't physically present. It might be, if someone decides to build it. 
At one point Sun were building/were planning to build a Java chip, which 
would have had java bytecode as its machine code.

BTW the first well-known byte code system was the UCSD Pascal p-code 
system, in the mid 70s. The idea of a bytecode goes back to Peter 
Landin's seminal 1964 paper: A Mechanical Method for Evaluating Expressions.