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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Perl is Compiled or Interpreted?

Everyone knows that there are two types of languages interpreted and compiled. Does anyone know what type of language a perl is? If your instant answer is interpreted, maybe this post will make you think otherwise.

When one runs a perl program, perl actually generates a intermediate code called as the bytecode. Now when perl is finished with bytecode where it usually compiles the whole of a program, it takes over the responsibility of being an interpreter and acts accordingly scanning and processing each line of code. So perl is actually an intermediate language. It is neither a strictly compiled language nor a strictly interpreted one.