Your programming language matters: A beginner's guide to interpreted languages

Computers are powerful machines that execute simple instructions at incredible speeds. They can perform millions of these instructions every second. This speed is made possible by the binary nature of the computer's hardware. The long sequence of 0s and 1s that make up the instructions for the computer to execute is called machine code and it is very difficult for humans to read and interpret. To simplify the writing of instructions, programming languages are developed to be human-readable.

These human-readable languages must be translated into a form that computers can understand. The processing and execution of programming languages involve two main paradigms: compilation and interpretation. This article is focused on interpreted programming languages.

Fundamentals of Language Processing

Every programming language must be translated from the human-readable version to machine executable code. Programming languages that are translated into machine code are called compiled languages. and the ones that are translated into an intermediate representation are called interpreted languages.

An interpreted language is a type of programming language where most of the instructions are executed directly, without a separate compilation step. Instead of converting the code into machine language beforehand (like in compiled languages), interpreted languages run through an interpreter that reads and executes the code line by line.