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No, it's actually the other way around: Red and Rebol are interpreted by default, and Red has a bootstrapping AOT compiler capable of bridging it with Red/System (a C-like sub-language), which it turn targets machine code. However, since Red is highly dynamic, compiler cannot preserve semantics across the whole language, so it keeps some parts for the interpreter to process at run-time. And sometimes that's the only option, since code can be generated on-the-fly or pulled over the network: Red is homoiconic and has quite powerful meta-programming facilities on top of that.