Compiler

A compiler is a program that translates source code into another form, often machine code. It typically analyzes and transforms the code before producing its output.

Lexical analysis: The process of converting a character stream into tokens such as identifiers, keywords, and punctuation. It turns source characters into tokens that later compiler stages can analyze.
Programming language: A formal language used to express instructions and computations for people or computers. A compiler implements translation rules for one or more programming languages.
Interpreter: A program that executes instructions from a source or intermediate representation, generally without producing a separate native executable first. An interpreter commonly executes program operations directly, while a compiler produces translated output.
Grace Hopper: An American computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who pioneered machine-independent programming languages and compiler development. Her early work helped establish the idea that programs could be translated from a higher-level notation.
Machine code: Instructions encoded for direct execution by a processor. Native compilers commonly translate source programs into the instruction set of a target processor.
Parsing: The process of organizing tokens according to a grammar to determine their syntactic structure. It checks whether the token sequence fits the programming language's grammar.
Source code: Human-readable instructions written in a programming language. It is the input that a source-to-target compiler translates.
Assembler: A program that translates assembly language into machine code. An assembler handles a lower-level symbolic language than most compilers.
A-0 System: An early compiler-like system developed by Grace Hopper for the UNIVAC I in the 1950s. It is a landmark example of early automatic translation from symbolic instructions.
Linker: A program that combines compiled object files and libraries into an executable or another linked artifact. It commonly follows compilation to resolve references between separately compiled components.

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