Re^4: A Perl interpreter written in Perl?

[LanX]

I'm not aware of any real interpreter languages anymore. That's a distinction from the 80s or 90s, reality evolved faster than terminology.¹

Perl has a compiler creating optimized op-codes, you can even precompile .pl to .plc code.

The engine running this code is roughly kind of like the JVM, but not as flexible because of many idiosyncracies.

The real difference nowadays is not interpreted vs compiled, but dynamic typing vs static typing.

Compare JavaScript vs TypeScript.²

In this light, it's hard to answer the OP because I don't know what he thinks an interpreter does.

¹) Microsoft BASIC was interpreted, the source for almost all BASIC dialects back then. But even here the source code was normalized internally to 2 letter mnemonics to optimize space and speed.

²) That's a fair comparison, since JS was heavily influenced by Perl.

[hippo]

I'm not aware of any real interpreter languages anymore.

Pretty much all of the shells (bash, ash, zsh, etc.) are still real interpreters, AFAIAA.

[LanX]

Yes, I remember Emacs Lisp also having this fine differences depending on interpretation vs compilation.

So these very old languages still hanging around are candidates for real interpretation.

Update

Found this interesting comparison between bash and perl execution on SO

is-bash-compiled-or-interpreted

Update

Maybe I was biased to consider bash etc as not real languages, because the idea of writing apps with several thousand LOCs gives me shivers.