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Question:

"Certain properties of a programming language may require that the only way to get the code written in it be executed is by interpretation. In other words, compilation to a native machine code of a traditional CPU is not possible. What are these properties?"

Compilers: Principles and Practice by Parag H. Dave and Himanshu B. Dave (May 2, 2012)

The book gives no clue about the answer. I tried to find the answer on Concepts of Programming Languages (SEBESTA), but to no avail. Web searches were of little avail too. Do you have any clue?

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    $\begingroup$ Famously, Perl can't even be parsed. Other than that, the claim seems to be trivially wrong without further assumptions: if there is an interpreter, I can always bundle interpreter and code in one executable, voila. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 11:04
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    $\begingroup$ @Raphael: Nice idea, but ... 1) You're assuming the code is available prior to being executed. That doesn't hold for interactive use. Sure, you can use just-in-time compilation to native code on bash statements or PostScript stack contents, but it's a pretty crazy idea. 2) Your idea doesn't actually compile the code: the bundle isn't a compiled version of the code, but still an interpreter for the code. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 16:53
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    $\begingroup$ In the good old days I had self editing gwbasic programs (gwbasic stores basic programs in a kind of bytecode). I currently can't think of a sane way to compile those to native machine code while retaining their ability to edit themselves. $\endgroup$
    – PlasmaHH
    Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 20:03
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    $\begingroup$ @PlasmaHH: Self Modifying Code goes back to 1948. The first compiler was written in 1952. The concept of self-modifying code was invented in native machine code. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 21:49
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    $\begingroup$ @reinierpost Raphael is taking a theoretical stand on this issue. It has the merit of showing the conceptual limitations of the question. Compiling is translation from language S to language T. Language T could be an extension of S to which interpreting code in some other languge can be added. So bundling S and its interpreter is a program in language T. It seems absurd to an engineer, but it shows that it is not easy to formulate the question meaningfully. How do you distinguish an acceptable compiling process from an unacceptable one (such as Raphael's) from an engineering point of view? $\endgroup$
    – babou
    Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 22:23

9 Answers 9

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The distinction between interpreted and compiled code is probably a fiction, as underlined by Raphael's comment:

the claim seems to be trivially wrong without further assumptions: if there is
an interpreter, I can always bundle interpreter and code in one executable ...

The fact is that code is always interpreted, by software, by hardware or a combination of both, and the compiling process cannot tell which it will be.

What you perceive as compilation is a translation process from one language $S$ (for source) to another language $T$ (for target). And, the interpreter for $S$ is usually different from the interpreter for $T$.

The compiled program is translated from one syntactic form $P_S$ to another syntactic form $P_T$, such that, given the intended semantics of the languages $S$ and $T$, $P_S$ and $P_T$ have the same computational behavior, up to a few things that you are usually trying to change, possibly to optimize, such as complexity or simple efficiency (time, space, surface, energy consumption). I am trying not to talk of functional equivalence, as it would require precise definitions.

Some compilers have been actually used simply to reduce the size of the code, not to "improve" execution. This was the case for language used in the Plato system (though they did not call it compiling).

You may consider your code fully compiled if, after the compiling process, you no longer need the interpreter for $S$. At least, that is the only way I can read your question, as an engineering rather than theoretical question (since, theoretically, I can always rebuild the interpreter).

One thing that may raise problem, afaik, is meta-circularity. That is when a program will manipulate syntactic structures in its own source language $S$, creating program fragment that are then intepreted as if they had been part of the original program. Since you can produce arbitrary program fragments in the language $S$ as the result of arbitrary computation manipulating meaningless syntactic fragments, I would guess you can make it nearly impossible (from an engineering point of view) to compile the program into the language $T$, so that it now generate fragments of $T$. Hence the interpreter for $S$ will be needed, or at least the compiler from $S$ to $T$ for on-the-fly compiling of generated fragments in $S$ (see also this document).

But I am not sure how this can be formalized properly (and do not have time right now for it). And impossible is a big word for an issue that is not formalized.

Futher remarks

Added after 36 hours. You may want to skip this very long sequel.

The many comments to this question show two views of the problem: a theoretical view that see it as meaningless, and an engineering view that is unfortunately not so easily formalized.

There are many ways to look at interpretation and compilation, and I will try to sketch a few. I will attempt to be as informal as I can manage

The Tombstone Diagram

One of the early formalization (early 1960s to late 1990) is the T or Tombstone diagrams. These diagrams presented in composable graphical elements the implementation language of the interpreter or compiler, the source language being interpreted or compiled, and the target language in the case of compilers. More elaborate versions can add attributes. These graphic representations can be seen as axioms, inference rules, usable to mechanically derive processor generation from a proof of their existence from the axioms, à la Curry-Howard (though I am not sure that was done in the sixties :).

Partial evaluation

Another interesting view is the partial evaluation paradigm. I am taking a simple view of programs as a kind of function implementation that computes an answer given some input data. Then an interpreter $I_S$ for the language $S$ is a program that take a program $p_S$ written in $S$ and data $d$ for that program, and computes the result according to the semantics of $S$. Partial evaluation is a technique for specializing a program of two arguments $a_1$ and $a_2$, when only one argument, say $a_1$, is known. The intent is to have a faster evaluation when you finally get the second argument $a_2$. It is especially useful if $a_2$ changes more often than $a_1$ as the cost of partial evaluation with $a_1$ can be amortized on all the computations where only $a_2$ is changing.

This is a frequent situation in algorithm design (often the topic of the first comment on SE-CS), when some more static part of the data is pre-processed, so that the cost of the pre-processing can be amortized on all applications of the algorithm with more variable parts of the input data.

This is also the very situation of interpreters, as the first argument is the program to be executed, and is usually executed many times with different data (or has subparts executed many times with different data). Hence it become a natural idea to specialize an interpreter for faster evaluation of a given program by partially evaluating it on this program as first argument. This may be seen as a way of compiling the program, and there has been significant research work on compiling by partial evaluation of a interpreter on its first (program) argument.

The Smn theorem

The nice point about the partial evaluation approach is that it does take its roots in theory (though theory can be a liar), notably in Kleene's Smn theorem. I am trying here to give an intuitive presentation of it, hoping it will not upset pure theoreticians.

Given a Gödel numbering $\varphi$ of recursive functions, you can view $\varphi$ as your hardware, so that given the Gödel number $p$ (read object code) of a program $\varphi_p$ is the function defined by $p$ (i.e. computed by the object code on your hardware).

In its simplest form, the theorem is stated in wikipedia as follows (up to a small change in notation):

Given a Gödel numbering $\varphi$ of recursive functions, there is a primitive recursive function $\sigma$ of two arguments with the following property: for every Gödel number $q$ of a partial computable function $f$ with two arguments, the expressions $\varphi_{\sigma(q,x)}(y)$ and $f(x,y)$ are defined for the same combinations of natural numbers $x$ and $y$, and their values are equal for any such combination. In other words, the following extensional equality of functions holds for every $x$: $\;\;\varphi_{\sigma(q,x)} \simeq \lambda y.\varphi_q(x,y).\,$

Now, taking $q$ as the interpreter $I_S$, $x$ as the source code of a program $p_S$, and $y$ as the data $d$ for that program, we can write: $\;\;\varphi_{\sigma(I_S,p_S)} \simeq \lambda d.\varphi_{I_S}(p_S,d).\,$

$\varphi_{I_S}$ may be seen as the execution of the interpreter $I_S$ on the hardware, i.e., as a black-box ready to interpret programs written in language $S$.

The function $\sigma$ may be seen as a function that specializes the interpreter $I_S$ for the program $P_S$, as in partial evaluation. Thus the Gödel number $\sigma(I_S,p_S)$ may be seen has object code that is the compiled version of program $p_S$.

So the function $\;C_S = \lambda q_S.\sigma((I_S,q_S)$ may be seen as a function that take as argument the source code of a program $q_S$ written in language $S$, and return the object code version for that program. So $C_S$ is what is usually called a compiler.

Some conclusions

However, as I said: "theory can be a liar", or actually seem to be one. The problem is that we know nothing of the function $\sigma$. There are actually many such functions, and my guess is that the proof of the theorem may use a very simple definition for it, which might be no better, from an engineering point of view, than the solution proposed by Raphael: to simply bundle the source code $q_S$ with the interpreter $I_S$. This can always be done, so that we can say: compiling is always possible.

Formalizing a more restrictive notion of what is a compiler would require a more subtle theoretical approach. I do not know what may have been done in that direction. The very real work done on partial evaluation is more realistic from an engineering point of view. And there are of course other techniques for writing compilers, including extraction of programs from the proof of their specification, as developed in the context of type-theory, based on the Curry-Howard isomorphism (but I am getting outside my domain of competence).

My purpose here has been to show that Raphael's remark is not "crazy", but a sane reminder that things are not obvious, and not even simple. Saying that something is impossible is a strong statement that does require precise definitions and a proof, if only to have a precise understanding of how and why it is impossible. But building a proper formalization to express such a proof may be quite difficult.

This said, even if a specific feature is not compilable, in the sense understood by engineers, standard compiling techniques can always be applied to parts of the programs that do not use such a feature, as is remarked by Gilles' answer.

To follow on Gilles' key remarks that, depending on the language, some thing may be done at compile-time, while other have to be done at run-time, thus requiring specific code, we can see that the concept of compilation is actually ill-defined, and is probably not definable in any satisfactory way. Compilation is only an optimization process, as I tried to show in the partial evaluation section, when I compared it with static data preprocessing in some algorithms.

As a complex optimization process, the concept of compilation actually belongs to a continuum. Depending on the characteristic of the language, or of the program, some information may be available statically and allow for better optimization. Others things have to be postponed to run-time. When things get really bad, everything has to be done at run-time at least for some parts of the program, and bundling source-code with the interpreter is all you can do. So this bundling is just the low end of this compiling continuum. Much of the research on compilers is about finding ways to do statically what used to be done dynamically. Compile-time garbage collection seems a good example.

Note that saying that the compilation process should produce machine code is no help. That is precisely what the bundling can do as the interpreter is machine code (well, thing can get a bit more complex with cross-compilation).

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    $\begingroup$ "impossible is a big word" A very very big word. =) $\endgroup$
    – Brian S
    Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 18:43
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    $\begingroup$ If one defines "compilation" to refer to a sequence of steps which take place entirely before an executing program receives its first input, and interpretation as being the process of having data control program flow via means which are not part of the program's abstract machine model, then for a language to be compiled it must be possible for the compiler to identify, before execution begins, every possible meaning a language construct could have. In languages where a language construct could have an unbounded number of meanings, compilation won't work. $\endgroup$
    – supercat
    Commented Sep 2, 2014 at 18:52
  • $\begingroup$ @BrianS No, it's not, and it's impossible to prove otherwise ;) $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 17:18
  • $\begingroup$ @supercat That still isn't a definition. What is the 'meaning' of a language construct? $\endgroup$
    – Rhymoid
    Commented Sep 4, 2014 at 12:26
  • $\begingroup$ I love the concept of viewing a compiler/interpreter as some kind of partial execution! $\endgroup$
    – Bergi
    Commented Sep 4, 2014 at 13:19
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The question is not actually about compilation being impossible. If a language can be interpreted¹, then it can be compiled in a trivial way, by bundling the interpreter with the source code. The question is asking what language features make this essentially the only way.

An interpreter is a program that takes source code as input and behaves as specified by the semantics of that source code. If an interpreter is necessary, this means that the language includes a way to interpret source code. This feature is called eval. If an interpreter is required as part of the language's runtime environment, it means that the language includes eval: either eval exists as a primitive, or it can be encoded in some way. Languages known as scripting languages usually include an eval feature, as do most Lisp dialects.

Just because a language includes eval doesn't mean that the bulk of it can't be compiled to native code. For example, there are optimizing Lisp compilers, that generate good native code, and that nonetheless support eval; eval'ed code may be interpreted, or may be compiled on the fly.

eval is the ultimate needs-an-interpreter feature, but there are other features that require something short of an interpreter. Consider some typical phases of a compiler:

  1. Parsing
  2. Type checking
  3. Code generation
  4. Linking

eval means that all these phases have to be performed at runtime. There are other features that make native compilation difficult. Taking it from the bottom, some languages encourage late linking by providing ways in which functions (methods, procedures, etc.) and variables (objects, references, etc.) can depend on non-local code changes. This makes it difficult (but not impossible) to generate efficient native code: it's easier to keep object references as calls in a virtual machine, and let the VM engine handle the bindings on the fly.

Generally speaking, reflection tends to make languages difficult to compile to native code. An eval primitive is an extreme case of reflection; many languages don't go that far, but nonetheless have a semantics defined in terms of a virtual machine, allowing for example code to retrieve a class by name, inspect its inheritance, list its methods, call a method, etc. Java with JVM and C# with .NET are two famous examples. The most straightforward way to implement these languages is by compiling them to bytecode, but there are nonetheless native compilers (many just-in-time) that compile at least program fragments that don't use advanced reflection facilities.

Type checking determines whether a program is valid. Different languages have different standards for how much analysis is performed at compile time vs run time: a language is known as “statically typed” if it performs many checks before starting to run the code, and “dynamically typed” if it doesn't. Some languages include a dynamic cast feature or unmarshall-and-typecheck feature; these feature require embedding a typechecker in the runtime environment. This is orthogonal to requirements of including a code generator or an interpreter in the runtime environment.

¹ Exercise: define a language that cannot be interpreted.

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  • $\begingroup$ (1) I disagree about bundling a interpreter with source code counting as compiling, but the rest of your post is excellent. (2) Totally agree about eval. (3) I don't see why reflection would make languages difficult to compile to native code. Objective-C has reflection, and (I assume) it is typically compiled. (4) Vaguely related note, C++ template metamagic is typically interpreted rather than compiled then executed. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 16:36
  • $\begingroup$ Just occured to me, Lua is compiled. The eval simply compiles the bytecode, and then as a separate step the binary executes the bytecode. And it definitely has reflection in the compiled binary. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 16:42
  • $\begingroup$ On a Harvard Architecture machine, compilation should yield code which never has to be accessed as "data". I would posit that information from the source file which ends up having to be stored as data rather than code isn't really "compiled". There's nothing wrong with a compiler taking a declaration like int arr[] = {1,2,5}; and generating an initialized-data section containing [1,2,5], but I wouldn't describe its behavior as translating [1,2,5] into machine code. If nearly all of a program has to get stored as data, what part of it would really be "compiled"? $\endgroup$
    – supercat
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 23:05
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    $\begingroup$ @supercat That's what mathematicians and computer scientists mean by trivial. It fits the mathematical definition, but nothing interesting happens. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 23:13
  • $\begingroup$ @Gilles: If the term "compile" is reserved for translation to machine instructions (without retention of associated "data") and accepts that in a compile language, the behavior of the array declaration isn't to "compile" the array, then there are some languages in which it is impossible to compile any meaningful fraction of the code. $\endgroup$
    – supercat
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 23:19
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I think the authors are assuming that compilation means

  • the source program doesn't need to be present at run-time, and
  • no compiler or interpreter needs to be present at run-time.

Here are some sample features that would make it problematic if not "impossible" for such a scheme:

  1. If you can interrogate the value of a variable at run-time, by referring to the variable by its name (which is a string), then you will need the variable names to be around at run time.

  2. If you can call a function/procedure at run-time, by referring to it by its name (which is a string), then you will need the function/procedure names at run-time.

  3. If you can construct a piece of program at run-time (as a string), say by running another program, or by reading it from a network connection etc., then you will need either an interpreter or a compiler at run-time to run this piece of program.

Lisp has all three features. So, Lisp systems always have an interpreter loaded at run-time. Languages Java and C# have function names available at run time, and tables to look up what they mean. Probably languages like Basic and Python also have variable names at run time. (I am not 100% sure about that).

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  • $\begingroup$ What if the "interpreter" is compiled into the code? For example, using dispatch tables to call virtual methods, are these an example of interpretation or compilation? $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 3:03
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    $\begingroup$ "no compiler or interpreter needs to be present at run-time", eh? Well if that's true, then in a deep sense, C can't be "compiled" on most platforms either. The C runtime doesn't have very much to do: startup, to set up stacks and so forth, and shutdown for atexit processing. But it still has to be there. $\endgroup$
    – Pseudonym
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 4:14
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    $\begingroup$ "Lisp systems always have an interpreter loaded at run-time." – Not necessarily. Many Lisp systems have a compiler at runtime. Some don't even haven an interpreter at all. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 10:39
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    $\begingroup$ Nice try, but en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine#Technical_overview. They do compile Lisp and are designed to execute the result efficiently. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 13:33
  • $\begingroup$ @Pseudonym: The C runtime is a library, not a compiler nor interpreter. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 16:43
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it is possible the current replies are "overthinking" the statement/ answers. possibly what the authors are referring to is the following phenomenon. many languages have an "eval" like command; eg see javascript eval and its behavior is commonly studied as a special part of CS theory (eg say Lisp). the function of this command is to evaluate the string in the context of the language definition. therefore in effect it has a similarity to a "built in compiler". the compiler cannot know the contents of the string until runtime. therefore compiling the eval result into machine code is not possible at compile time.

other answers point out that the distinction of interpreted vs compiled languages can blur significantly in many cases esp with more modern languages like say Java with a "just in time compiler" aka "Hotspot" (javascript engines eg V8 increasingly use this same technique). "eval-like" functionality is certainly one of them.

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    $\begingroup$ V8 is a good example. It is a pure compiler, there is never any interpretation going on. Yet it still supports the full semantics of ECMAScript, including unrestricted eval. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 10:42
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    $\begingroup$ Lua does the same thing. $\endgroup$ Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 16:47
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LISP is a terrible example, as it was conceived as a sort of higher-level "machine" language as a base for a "real" language. Said "real" language never materialized. LISP machines were built on the idea of doing (much of) LISP in hardware. As a LISP interpreter is just a program, it is in principle possible to implement it in circuitry. Not practical, perhaps; but far from impossible.

Furthermore, there are lots of interpreters programmed in silicon, normally called "CPU". And it is often useful to interpret (not yet existing, not at hand, ...) machine codes. E.g. Linux' x86_64 was first written and tested on emulators. There were full distributions on hand when the chips came to the market, even just for early adopters/testers. Java is often compiled to JVM code, which is an interpreter which would not be too hard to write in silicon.

Most "interpreted" languages are compiled to an internal form, which is optimized and then interpreted. This is e.g. what Perl and Python do. There are also compilers for meant-to-be interpreted languages, like the Unix shell. It is possible on the other hand to interpret traditionally compiled languages. One somewhat extreme example I saw was an editor which used interpreted C as extension language. It's C could run normal, but simple, programs with no issues.

On the other hand, modern CPUs even take the "machine language" input and translate it into lower-level instructions, which are then reordered and optimized (i.e., "compiled") before being handed off for execution.

This whole "compiler" vs "interpreter" distinction is really moot, somewhere in the stack there is an ultimate interpreter which takes "code" and executes it "directly". The input from the programmer undergoes transformations along the line, which of those is called "compiling" is just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand.

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The reality is that there is a big difference between interpreting some Basic program and executing assembler. And there are areas in-between with P-code / byte-code with or without (just-in-time) compilers. So I will try to summarise some points in the context of this reality.

  • If how source code is parsed depends on run-time conditions, writing a compiler may become impossible, or so hard that nobody will bother.

  • Code that modifies itself is in the general case impossible to compile.

  • A program that uses an eval-like function usually cannot be completely compiled in advance (if you regard the string fed to it as part of the program), although if you're going to run the eval'ed code repeatedly it may still be useful to have your eval-like function invoke the compiler. Some languages provide an API for the compiler to make this easy.

  • The ability to refer to things by name doesn't preclude compilation, but you do need tables (as mentioned). Calling functions by name (like IDispatch) requires a lot of plumbing, to the point where I think most people would agree that we're effectively talking about a function call interpreter.

  • Weak typing (whatever your definition) makes compilation harder and perhaps the result less efficient, but often not impossible, unless different values trigger different parses. There is a sliding scale here: if the compiler can't deduce the actual type, it will need to emit branches, function calls and such that wouldn't otherwise be there, effectively embedding bits of interpreter in the executable.

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i would presume the main feature of a programming language that makes a compiler for the language impossible (in a strict sense, see also self-hosting) is the self-modification feature. Meaning the language allows to change the source code during run-time (sth a compiler generating, fixed and static, object code cannot do). A classic example is Lisp (see also Homoiconicity). Similar functionality is provided using a language construct such as eval, included in many languages (e.g javaScript). Eval actually calls the interpreter (as a function) at run-time.

In other words the language can represent its own meta-system (see also Metaprogramming)

Note that language reflection, in the sense of querying about meta-data of a certain source code, and possibly modify the meta-data only, (sth like Java's or PHP's reflection mechanism) is not problematic for a compiler, since it already has those meta-data at compile time and can make them available to the compiled program, as needed, if needed.

Another feature that makes compilation difficult or not the best option (but not impossible) is the typing scheme used in the language (i.e dynamic typing vs static typing and strong typing vs loose typing). This makes difficult for the compiler to have all the semantics at compile-time, so effectively a part of the compiler (in other words an interpreter) becomes part of the generated code which handles the semantics at run-time. This is, in other words, not compilation but interpretation.

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  • $\begingroup$ LISP is a terrible example, as it was conceive as a sprt $\endgroup$
    – vonbrand
    Commented Jan 17, 2016 at 18:25
  • $\begingroup$ @vonbrand, maybe but displays both the homoiconicity concept and uniform data-code duality $\endgroup$
    – Nikos M.
    Commented Jan 17, 2016 at 22:34
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I feel the original question is not well formed. The authors of the question may have intended to ask a somewhat different question: What properties of a progamming language facilitate writing a compiler for it?

For example, it's easier to write a compiler for a context-free language than a context-sensitive language. The grammar which defines a language can also have issues that make it challenging to compile, such as ambiguities. Such issues can be resolved but require extra effort. Similarly, languages defined by unrestricted grammars are harder to parse than context-sensitive languages (see Chomsky Hierarchy). To my knowledge most widely used procedural programming languages are close to context-free, but have a few context-sensitive elements, making them relatively easy to compile.

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    $\begingroup$ The question is clearly intending to oppose/compare compilers and interpreters. While they may work differently, and usually do except for @Raphael limit case above, they have exactly the same problems regarding syntax analysis and ambiguity. So syntax cannot be the issue. I also believe that syntactic problem are not usually the major concern in compiler writing nowadays, though it has been in the past. I am not the downvoter: I prefer commenting. $\endgroup$
    – babou
    Commented Sep 3, 2014 at 8:33
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The question has a correct answer so obvious that it's typically overlooked as being trivial. But it does matter in many contexts, and is the primary reason why interpreted languages exist:

Compiling source code into machine code is impossible if you don't yet have the source code.

Interpreters add flexibility, and in particular they add the flexibility of running code that wasn't available when the underlying project was compiled.

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    $\begingroup$ "I lost the source code" is not a property of a programming language but of a particular program, so that doesn't answer the question. And you definitely need a citation for the claim that avoiding loss of the source code is "the primary reason why interpreted languages exist", or even a reason why they exist. $\endgroup$ Commented Nov 11, 2014 at 9:28
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    $\begingroup$ @DavidRicherby I guess the use case tyleri has in mind is interactive interpretation, i.e. code entered at runtime. I agree, though, that that is out of the scope of the question since it's not a feature of the language. $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Commented Nov 11, 2014 at 11:24
  • $\begingroup$ @DavidRicherby and Raphael, i say that the author of this post implies (what i describe in my answer) as the self-modification feature which of course is a language construct by design and not an artifact of some specific program $\endgroup$
    – Nikos M.
    Commented Jan 17, 2016 at 22:46

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