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That is incorrect. I don't know of any mainstream Python implementation that has ever interpreted the code directly, except perhaps in a context like evasl(). CPython has all ways compiled to byte-code first.

Actual sourced-based interpretation is _very_ slow, and pretty rare in anything that sees meaningful real world use. Ruby was, back when it was an order of magnitude slower than Python, but no other example jumps readily to mind, and Ruby went bytecode with the release of 1.9 in 2007.



Ah you are right, I didn't know that about Python. Since it can compile to IR on the fly though, I think it gets more tricky as well. Probably fair to consider that interpreted or compiled both. Like they say in their doc:

> Python is an interpreted language, as opposed to a compiled one, though the distinction can be blurry because of the presence of the bytecode compiler. This means that source files can be run directly without explicitly creating an executable which is then run.

OpenJDK can't do that. You need to pre-compile the source to byte code first.




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