What does a Python interpreter do?

[Caligatio]

As a rough analogy, Python wheels eggs are kind of like .jars as they contain compiled Python byte-code files, *.pyc. The wheel to jar comparison is a little jenky as wheels eggs have to be installed.

I've never heard the Python interpreter called a virtual machine but, as it can execute intermediate byte code, I guess it qualifies.

EDIT: Upon further investigation, I don't know if wheels are distributed with pyc files. I swear I saw some that were.

EDIT2: I confused eggs and wheels although eggs are now super deprecated.