What is a Compiler?
A compiler is a special type of computer program that translates a human readable text file into a form that the computer can more easily understand. At its most basic level, a computer can only understand two things, a 1 and a 0. At this level, a human will operate very slowly and find the information contained in the long string of 1s and 0s incomprehensible. A compiler is a computer program that bridges this gap. In the beginning, compilers were very simple programs that could only translate symbols into the bits, the 1s and 0s, the computer understood. Programs were also very simple, composed of a series of steps that were originally translated by hand into data the computer could understand. This was a very time consuming task, so portions of this task were automated or programmed, and the first compiler was written. This program assembled, or compiled, the steps required to execute the step by step program. These simple compilers were used to write a more sophisticated compiler.
A compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language). The original sequence is usually called the source code and the output called object code. Usually the output has a form suitable for processing by other programs. If you need to compile and port an existing serial or MPI-based parallel application program to the IA-64 Linux Cluster, use a compiler to make your program or set of programs executable on the SDSC machine. Go to SDSC User Services for details about each SDSC machine compilers.
A compiler is a program that translates a source program written in some high-level programming language (such as Java) into machine code for some computer architecture (such as the Intel Pentium architecture). The generated machine code can be later executed many times against different data each time. An interpreter reads an executable source program written in a high-level programming language as well as data for this program, and it runs the program against the data to produce some results. One example is the Unix shell interpreter, which runs operating system commands interactively. Note that both interpreters and compilers (like any other program) are written in some high-level programming language (which may be different from the language they accept) and they are translated into machine code. For a example, a Java interpreter can be completely written in Pascal, or even Java. The interpreter source program is machine independent since it does not generate machine code. (Note th
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