> It's pedantic to expect a writer to hedge against every possible interpretation, when their focus should be on communicating clearly in the first place. Our

> It's pedantic to expect a writer to hedge against every possible interpretation, when their focus should be on communicating clearly in the first place. Our discipline (computer programming) is, perhaps more than any other, one in which precision of meaning is of paramount importance. I expect people to hedge. Especially when it's easy: "Python is not usually compiled to native code." In any case, since Python is virtually always compiled, saying it's not is simply false. That's hardly clear communication, I think. > Obviously python is interpreted by any meaningful definition of interpretation .... Now, here I'm not sure what you mean. You've already distinguished interpretation from Just-In-Time compilation to Virtual Machine code. Since the latter is pretty much always what happens with Python, would you then say that Python is not interepreted? (Serious question!) Me, I don't have a problem with these concepts overlapping (and I don't see why many people do). Python is interpreted. The usual mechanism for this is JIT compilation to virtual-machine code, which is then -- in the case of CPython -- interpreted as-is. In contrast, something like "C" is traditionally Ahead-Of-Time (AOT) compiled to native code. Interpreted: no. Compiled: yes. And then there are languages whose interpreters do not involve a compilation step -- although they are becoming rare.