Introduction to Concurrency in Programming Languages

High-Level Language Constructs 105

In theory, a compiled language can be implemented in an interpreted man-

ner, as the interpreter itself is simply an abstraction of the underlying comput-

ing hardware. What distinguishes interpreted languages from their compiled

cousins is that they are typically designed specifically to take advantage of

flexibility afforded to them by the interpreter. This flexibility is often used

to provide dynamic capabilities within the language that would be difficult to

implement in compiled code. Some of these dynamic capabilities include:

• Dynamic typing: Resolution of the types of objects at runtime based on

the runtime behavior of the program.

• Runtime code specification: Introducing new code into the executable

at runtime. ...