Almost: Intermediate representation. "Intermediate" because its primary purpose is communication between different phases of a compiler in a serializable form.

Almost: Intermediate representation. "Intermediate" because its primary purpose is communication between different phases of a compiler in a serializable form. Some compilers actually have multiple IRs for different stages; for example, GHC will first turn Haskell code into "Core," followed by STG, C--, and LLVM IR.