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Some languages cannot be compiled because their behavior is dependent on runtime values. An example is John Shutt's Kernel language. Here's what Shutt has to s

• p4bl0 9y ago
  I don't think this breaks my point. For example, I don't see of any reason a language could be compiled but not interpreted. And that alone breaks the idea that a language is necessarily either compiled or interpreted. Moreover, the distinction that Shutt makes in this blogpost between compiled and interpreted is not very clear: most of what he says rings more to me as a distinction between static and dynamic rather than between compiled and interpreted, but I concede that I read the blogpost rather quickly and without taking the time to fully grasp everything.
  • khedoros1 9y ago
    Interpreters are more flexible; I'd expect that any compiled language could also be interpreted. I'd expect that at least some languages where the canonical implementation is an interpreter could also have an ahead-of-time compiler implementation, but that some of those languages would have at least sections of the program that need to be just-in-time compiled (or even recompiled) at runtime. That would pose extra difficulty in making a compiled implementation of the language.