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Comment by ghusbands | Hacker News Reader

That's a partial evaluator, not an interpreter, and it converts an interpreter into compiler, which are different things.

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> Interpreters don't translate bytecode to native instructions.

> That's a partial evaluator, not an interpreter, and it converts an interpreter into compiler, which are different things.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Compilers/comments/1sm90x5/retrofit...

Yes, that's another great example of the same kind of thing - creating a JIT from an interpreter. It remains true that interpreters do not directly generate machine code.

The author of weval is the top comment.

Reading the comments and understanding that transitively, weval turns interpreters into compilers, allowing interpreters to generate machine code.

If you turn milk into cheese it isn't milk any more, and it doesn't prove that milk is a yellow solid.

We lost the plot here.

What are your goals, to let everyone know that interpreters, definitionally don't generate code? This isn't debate club.

I dropped a cool link that shows we have a machine that turns interpreters into compilers. I am talking about the machine. You are talking about the definition. We aren't talking about the same thing.

Partly, it's simply that words matter. An interpreter is not a compiler, even if partial evaluators and Futamura transforms are very cool. Posting about them in a context that isn't a confusion about what interpreters are may have been more fruitful.

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