HP Prime Beta Firmware Version 2.2 Revision 15008

[CheshireChris]

(08-26-2024 07:27 AM)parisse Wrote:  This just make more confusion for newbies. Most interpreters will parse the whole source code and some will write bytecode, but that's not compilation like C or Julia does, at the end of the process you do not have native code that can be run by the CPU once loaded, bytecode can not be run without the help of a VM (virtual machine), and it will therefore be slower than native code (2* to 10* or more).

A compiler doesn't have to emit machine code in order to be a compiler. The process of converting a high-level language to bytecode is still compilation, and that does appear to be what's happening with Python on the Prime, which is the reason that it runs so much faster than PPL.