[efferifick]

I think a lot of people in the comments are hung up on defining compiler as "taking a source language and producing a binary". I personally know Eddie and I agree with his points. (Even though his title is a bit provocative and contradicts one of the points in the article "A language is not inherently compiled or interpreted; whether a language is compiled or interpreted (or both!) is an implementation detail.")

I perhaps have not had a long professional life working with compilers (5+ years), but to me the definition of "compiles to binary" is too restrictive. The main things I care for in my work are:

1. To be able to perform some sort of static analysis on the program 2. To be able to transform the program representation

To other commenters: in Python, we have two program representations. The human readable string representation and the bytecode representation. The syntactical errors are a kind of static analysis. To me, the maps between the Python string representation and the bytecode representation and the classes of errors we can catch without running the program is far more interesting than pigeon-holing Python in the "compiled" or "interpreted" hole.