>>In reality, I believe it's neither an interpreter nor a true compiler, but something else. From an abstract point of view, you can call it an interpreter or "something else". I'm a big believer in defintions. Applying precise one's wherer or abstract one's as necessary. Here, I don't feel that "interpreter" precisely defines what it does.
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>That was essentially what I was trying to point out, it's somewhere in between. Though none of this is necessarily a bad point about VfP, & probably not of much use or interest to Irene.
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>FWIW, though, I think I would suggest that if to run a particular statement (original code or p-code) then a translation had to be made every time it was run, then the run-time engine would be define as an interpreter. But that's just my opinion & not knowing enough about the internal workings of VfP at run time, I can't say where that places VfP.

IMO, it probably places it "in-between". In the strictest sense of the definition of interpreter, it isn't one. In the strictest sense of the definition of compiler (produces native code), it isn't that either. You could, however, I suppose, refine the defintion of a compiler to include the statement that it produces "stand-alone native code", in which case nothing that runs under Win32 would qualify.< bg >