Welcome to the Treehouse Community
Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.
Looking to learn something new?
Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.
Start your free trial
Jeniffer Valdez
243 PointsCompiling
Can someone explain/clarify when a higher language needs to be compiled? Quiz questioned implied "Higher language have to be..." but I didn't get that take-away from the video. If it is a requirement, what makes it so? If no, what are the different scenarios in which a higher language would be required or not required to be compiled?
1 Answer
Steven Parker
231,271 PointsThere's basically two ways for code in a computer language to run.
You didn't provide a link to the lesson so I might be diverging a bit from the teaching here.
But one way for a program to run is to compile it, which converts it into machine code that the computer can execute directly. And the other way is it interpret it, where a program (which was already compiled) reads the language and performs the appropriate steps in the computer for it. So a higher-level language program must always be either compiled or interpreted. And it could be that the interpreted option may not have been discussed in the lesson so the correct quiz answer might only be "compiled".