From: Xavier Noria <fxn@...>
Date: 2007-01-20T01:53:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Python, questions (not a flamewar!)

On Jan 18, 2007, at 8:03 PM, Giles Bowkett wrote:

> Python isn't really an interpreted language in the sense that Ruby is.
> Python scripts compile to Python bytecode, and it's the bytecode --
> not the script itself -- which the interpreter runs. This is an
> intermediate zone between a pure interpreted language like Ruby, and a
> pure compiled language like C. The Python bytecode interpreter is
> generally faster than regular scripting language interpreters, but
> slower than C. However, it's not always very much slower. Lots of
> low-level operations, like GUI stuff and I/O stuff, are handed off
> directly to C code within the interpreter, and run pretty quickly
> because of that. Long story short, Python's unusually fast for a
> scripting language.

Perl compiles to high-level bytecodes, for instance map or grep are  
opcodes. Are Python bytecodes similar? What about YARV?

-- fxn