Writing a compiler seems like a much harder problem than an interpreter. That might be true today, but I would argue that it was not the case some 60 years ago.

Interpreter An interpreter, on the other hand, is a program that reads a program’s source code line by line and runs it immediately without first creating a file of intermediate machine code.

A compiler is a computer program that translates from one format to another, most often from a high-level computer language to byte code and machine code. Compilers come in a number of variations ...

Java compiler vs. Java interpreter Java programmers use a Java compiler and an interpreter. They are both essential in high-level languages like Java and both play a role converting high-level code to ...

Compilers A compiler takes the source code as a whole and translates it into object code all in one go. Once converted, the object code can be run at any time. This process is called compilation .