Application code is not delivered as object code for the underlying processor in scripting languages

Question

Source code is present at run time in production system (though it may be compiled into ByteCode, native object code, or some other format for performance reasons). Application code is not delivered as object code for the underlying processor (some stable system libraries may be pre-compiled in this way however). I read this lines from http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ScriptingLanguage

and i did not understood the line "Application code is not delivered as object code for the underlying processor" can anybody help me to understand this line because unless or until the object code has not delivered to the system the code will not be executed Then how come it is possible to have a application code which is not delivered to the processor help full to us please help me with a small example thank you......

Answer 1

A scripting language is (generally) interpreted. This means that there is an application (the interpreter) that reads the source file (which is in text format) and executes the instructions as it reads them (*). Thus no object code (for the interpreted program) is required

(*) this might not result in actual "performing" the code, might just store the defintion of a structure/class, etc.

This is in contrast with compiled programs that are first translated from source code to native-binary/byte-code/etc. by the compiler. In this case the source (text format) is not needed to execute the program, only the object code (the result of the translation).

Note: the line is a bit blured with byte-code-like object format. Although it is not the source code, it will stil have to be interpreted by the underlying virtual machine to be able to execute it on a CPU. Unless you treat the virtual machine as the machine that "executes" the object code (in the form of byte-code)