Interpreter

An interpreter is a form of program used to run other programs that you write.

Programs designed to do tasks on a computer are generally written in a high-level language (an English-like language) which the programmer can understand. Computers, however, need binary versions of these commands to execute them. An interpreter reads each high-level language command and translates it into its binary form and then causes the computer to execute that binary command. The interpreter does this for each command as it comes to it in the high-level language and the resulting binary commands are not stored anywhere so each time the program is run the interpreter must re-translate.

The alternative is to use a compiler which translates the entire high-level program into a binary form and then saves that form (generally as an .EXE file) so that the translation only needs to be done once.

Compiled programs generally run faster than interpreted programs.

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