|
Well, SBCL does not ship with an interpreter, for example. Expressions entered at the REPL get compiled directly to machine code, so there's no difference in performance for a function entered at the REPL (or via SLIME C-c C-c) and one built as part of a batch compile. Contrast that to Haskell's ghci interpreter, which is slower (last time I checked) than the same code built on the command line with ghc, the compiler. But I would still consider Haskell a compiled language, not an interpreted one, since you never run code in production under ghci, you always ship your binaries. I suppose it's about perception. To me "interpreter" refers to a language implementation strategy. It's fuzzy, I know, since there is some continuum between interpreting an AST directly, compiling the AST to bytecode and running the bytecode on a VM, JIT compiling the bytecode to machine code on the fly, and compiling offline direct to machine code (like C/Go/Rust). To some ears, "interpreted" can sound synonymous with "slow", which is I guess what prompted my comment. Finally, to me the place where you can enter expressions to try out your program interactively is the REPL, not the interpreter. Anyway, thanks for explaining your position to me. (Also, good to know Python dev environments have improved, but I guess it's to be expected, 10 years is a long time :-) .) |