What does it mean for a language to be `interpreted'?

Posted by Bubba88 on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Bubba88
Published on 2010-05-13T12:01:40Z Indexed on 2010/05/13 12:04 UTC
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interpreted-language

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interpreter

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ruby

Hi! A newbie question.

Do languages like e.g. Ruby (if running MRI, I mean not compiled to byte-code) run actually parsed everytime when an execution of e.g. method or loop body is needed? I mean, to execute a loop, you need to parse its body N times?

I just always thought that all these programs are being parsed one time at the bootstrap - transformed in a 'strongly-typed' statements tree etc.. Is that not true?

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