A compiled language is a programming language whose implementations are typically compilers (translators which generate machine code from source code), and not interpreters (step-by-step executors of source code, where no translation takes place).

The term is somewhat vague; in principle any language can be implemented with a compiler or with an interpreter. A combination of both solutions is also increasingly common: a compiler can translate the source code into some intermediate form (often called bytecode), which is then passed to an interpreter which executes it.

A program translated by a compiler tends to be much faster than an interpreter executing the same program: even a 10:1 ratio is not uncommon. The mixed solution's efficiency is typically somewhere in between. The downsides of the "compiler" solution are the inherent complexity of a good implementation, and longer edit-run cycles.

A pure compiler implementation is the typical solution for low-level languages, because it comes out as more "natural", and because of efficiency concerns; however with some effort it is always possible to write compilers even for traditionally interpreted languages such as Lisp and Prolog.

Languages

Some languages that are commonly considered to be compiled:

• Ada
• ALGOL
  • Algol 60
  • Algol 68
  • SMALL
• BASIC
• C
  • C++
  • Objective-C
  • D
• CLEO
• COBOL
• Cobra
• Common Lisp
• Delphi
• Eiffel
  • Sather
  • Ubercode
• Forth
• Fortran
• Haskell
• JOVIAL
• LabVIEW
• Lisp
• Lush
• ML
  • Standard ML
    • Alice
  • Ocaml
• Pascal
• Urq
• Visual Basic
• Visual Foxpro
• Visual Prolog

Tools

• ANTLR
• CodeWorker
• Lex
• Yacc
• GNU bison

See also

• compiler
• interpreter (computing)
• interpreted language

External links

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