It's good to be back. At 8:46 PM -0400 5/15/01, Rob Speer wrote:
On Tue, May 15, 2001 at 08:11:19PM -0400, Pierre Abbat wrote:On Mon, 14 May 2001, Rob Speer wrote: >mutmi'izba: [skami bangu] mucti minji zbasu: compiler >z1 makes program z2=mi1=mu1 for use mi2 from source code z3=p1=b3 in > language b4So source code ve mutmi'izba, if the language is compiled. But what about a PHPscript or a shell script, which is executed in source by an interpreter?A command interpreter is {le selmi'e}, so I suppose a script would be {lei termi'e}.
Fine. Now what about an APL interpreter, or the inner and outer interpreters in FORTH, a hardware interpreter for microcode or a hardware compiler translating source code to wiring lists and diagrams? What about systems that offer to run the same source code through a selection of processes, including interpretation, just-in-time compilation, virtual machine compilation with emulation (byte code interpretation), cross-compilation, or any of the other alternatives? What about translation from one language to another? I can cite APL-to-C, APL-to-Ada, C-to-PostScript, FORTRAN to Ratfor, and an assortment of other such translators used for serious work.
I don't think we have located all of the legs of the elephant here. Source code is originally human-readable, probably human-written instructions which are fed through a process in order to create one or more instances of the class of effects known as running the program. Even for compiled code, the compiler is only one step in the process, which may invoke a preprocessor, assembler, optimizer, linker, loader, and other kinds of software. I would not like to see separate words for all of these things. We should perhaps have a term that reserves a place for the process, rather than assuming or overspecifying its nature.
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