Compiled language

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A compiled language is a programming language whose implementations are typically compilers (translators that generate machine code from source code), and not interpreters (step-by-step executors of source code, where no pre-runtime translation takes place).

The term is somewhat vague. In principle, any language can be implemented with a compiler or with an interpreter.^[1] A combination of both solutions is also common: a compiler can translate the source code into some intermediate form (often called p-code or bytecode), which is then passed to an interpreter which executes it.