U & I need to Talk: as only human beings can

Om Sai Ram


I have been contemplating for long to start sharing my thoughts and experiences with like minded fellow beings and today on 26th of Oct' 2009, I have taken the first step on his journey of thousand miles. I have interest in two areas:

1.To find who I am
2. To share my knowledge about what I have learnt in Computer Engineering not only as student of this field but also as a teacher at UG and PG level for the last 25 years.

During my interaction with students and many teachers of the field, I have obseved that most of them carry a wrong concept about the difference between a Compiler and Interpreter.

The prevailing Def. about interpreter is: It converts the source program line by line into machine code and executes it.

I have about five books written by various authors that give the above definition with slight difference in words but sticking to the same concept.

In fact, the above given definition is wrong because Interpreter is not a Translator. It is a poor program, only capable of checking the syntax and semantics of the source language. It does not know the architecture of the machine and hence cannot translate. So, interpreter reads the instruction, parses it and executes it.

Therefore the precise def. of interpreter is: An interpreter is a program execution environment.

For details as to how it executes, kindly post your comments on this blog so that together we try to understand the mechanism in detail in our later discussions.


A. K. Sharma


Thought to Ponder:

Birth is consequences of Kama (desire) . Death is the consequence of Kala (Time).
Desire (Kama) was reduced to ashes by Shiva; the God Time is Kala or Yama. He was subdued by by Shiva. So one has to surrender to Shiva(God) if one has to escape the consequence of these two frightfully fatal forces.

(SSS Vol. 7, P179, Bhagwan Sri Satya sai baba).