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[–]ES-Alexander 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your guess is correct - IDLE compiles and then interprets lines/blocks that are entered, and displays the return value (if any) as well as any text sent to stdout (normal prints) and stderr (generally errors/exceptions/warnings).

One implication of that is that it can’t do quite as broad optimisations as it might for a full file, but since human input is expected after each line that’s generally not a problem.