compiler and interpreter

A compiler is a computer program (or a set of programs) that transforms source code written in a programming language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language), with the latter often having a binary form known as object code. The most common reason for converting a source code is to create an executable program.

In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without previously compiling them into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution:

• parse the source code and perform its behavior directly.
• translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this.
• explicitly execute stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system.

Whether execute the command is the biggest difference between an interpreter and a compiler. Refer the following chart for more comparisons.