[TUHS] Compilation "vs" byte-code interpretation, was Re: Looking back to 1981 - what pascal was popular on what unix?

[Dan Stromberg]

On Sun, Jan 30, 2022 at 8:58 AM David Barto <david at kdbarto.org> wrote:

> Yes, the UCSD P-code interpreter was ported to 4.1 BSD on the VAX and it
> ran natively there. I used it on sdcsvax in my senior year (1980).
>

This reminds me of a question I've had percolating in the back of my mind.

Was USCD Pascal "compiled" or "interpreted" or both?

And is Java?  They both have a byte code interpreter.  Yes, modern Java is
JIT-compiled, but does that make Java a compiled language in the Oracle
implementation, or is it an interpreter with a pretty good runtime?  Wasn't
Java referred to as "compiled" even back before the JIT compiler was
added?  Granted, gcj is compiled.  But Oracle's implementation of Java is
commonly referred to as a "Compiler".  And what about back before Java's
JIT compiler was added - ISTR recall Java was referred to as a compiled
language before the JIT addition.

And then there's the CPython implementation of Python.  It too uses a byte
code interpreter, but it's commonly referred to as "interpreted".  But is
it really?  Granted, it has an implicit, cached compilation step, but is it
less compiled for that?

Is there consistency here?
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