No, the grandparent post is correct. In my experience interpreter means anything other than executing machine code directly. That could mean interpreting the so

No, the grandparent post is correct. In my experience interpreter means anything other than executing machine code directly. That could mean interpreting the source directly (as was often done for BASIC), parsing the source then interpreting the syntax tree, or compiling to byte code and interpreting that. If you have any kind of innermost "engine loop" to fetch the next instruction and figure out what to do with it, you have an interpreter. If you compile to machine code, you no longer need an engine loop -- the CPU does it.