I was wondering which way would create a faster programming language, because I have tried both. Writing code that takes the text, splits it by whitespace or newlines or something, then processes each line and has a dictionary for variables. Or writing code that takes text and converts it to another programming language. This is an example of how a very simple version of the first way would be programmed in python:

def run(code):
    text = code.split(";")
    for t in text:
        if t == "hello":
            print "hi"

second:

def run(code):
    rcode = ""
    text = code.split(";")
    for t in text:
        if t == "hello":
            rcode += "print 'hi'"