1.8 Program Construction - Translators

Translators

• Assembler - a program which converts low level assembly language into machine code

• Interpreter - a program which converts code one line at a time into machine code and executes it

• Compiler - a program that converts high level language into machine code for execution at a later time (all at once)

There are four main stages of compilation:

Lexical analysis

• Unneccesary spaces and comments are removed
• Keywords, constants and identifiers are replaced by 'tokens'
• …