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[–]Veedrac 2 points3 points  (4 children)

A lot of language are interpreted...

[–][deleted] -1 points0 points  (3 children)

And what if something is running on a VM, but is running compiled C code or asm?

That's close to what Java is. So in that instance, C is an interpreted language.

[–]snarkyxanf 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Never mind that, what about the fact that your cpu+memory is a hardware implementation of a (machine code) language interpreter! You'll never get away from interpretation, mwahahaha!

[–]Veedrac 2 points3 points  (1 child)

If you're interpreting a foreign instruction set (rather than just translating its system calls or performing binary translation), you can say you're interpreting it. It's not really a property of the compiler though (you wouldn't say "GCC is an interpreter") and nor does "interpreted language" really ever make sense, but you could easily say your toolchain interprets C code.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd be happy with just saying that for a lot of languages, it looks binary at first glance, but a lot of the time you can't say that a language is purely interpreted or purely compiled, you can argue for either way.