[monocasa]

Except that there's a true formal (in fact legal) distinction between a car and a truck (they have different emissions standards). The whole distinction between a 'transpilers' and other compilers on the other hand is 'what is the user going to do with the output'.

[tlrobinson]

That's not the disinction I've seen. I like Wikipedia's:

> translates between programming languages that operate at approximately the same level of abstraction

That's fairly straightforward, though a bit subjective (which doesn't preclude a word from having meaning)