Re: PHP - Interpreted or Compiled Language

And on transmeta's crusoe CPU even i386 code is translated into crusoe's native code. Curt Zirzow wrote:

* Thus wrote Robert Cummings (robert@wocmud.org):

While is is true that the opcodes cannot be run as machine code, the opcode (bytecode) can be run on any machine which has the PHP engine (or an opcode reader). Does Java not call itself a compiled language? If so then the simple addition of PHP Accelerator, or Zend Accelerator should be sufficient to call it a compiled language. Anyways I can't really say for sure, traditional scripting languages didn't create such blurry lines between compiled and interpreted :)

Excellent point. You can even generate bytecode for perl and skip the parsing. There is always that level from parsing -> bytecode -> execution. It all comes down to who is actually running the bytecode level, in a compiled binary it is the OS that executes it otherwise its the interpreter. Curt