Overview

• All source code programs need to be translated before they can be executed. Assemblers, compilers, and interpreters are all types of program translator. However, they use different methods to translate programs.
• High-level languages, e.g. Visual Basic, C++, and Python, are used to write programs that are independent of the computer architecture they will run on. To move from high-level source code to executable machine code requires the source code to be translated. There are two main ways in which this can happen: compilation or interpretation.
• Whether source code will be compiled or interpreted is determined by the particular implementation of a programming language; some implementations provide compilers, and some provide interpreters. Some language implementations provide both types of translator.
• Low-level language code, i.e. assembly language programs, also needs to be translated. The translators used for assembly language programs are called assemblers.