> Not really. A compiled program also tells another program what to do. > For example a compiled binary interacts with the hardware by making > system calls that are handled by the kernel or the video driver or ..... > > A program that makes direct hardware calls is severely frowned upon > these days. Thus, except for the kernel and specialized hardware > drivers, all programs, whether they be binary executables (compiled) or > scripts (interpreted) actually interact in defined ways with other > programs (the shell, the kernel, the compiler, the interpreter, etc). > Programs are constantly making direct hardware calls, that is, executing machine language instructions (whether the source was written by the programmer or part of a library) to accomplish some task without having to make system calls. For example, calculating the sine of an angle or searching a table. Direct access to shared resources (peripherals, system clock, etc) is what is frowned upon. Compiled programs do not _interact_ with the compiler at run time. A compiler need not even be installed. At compile time the source code and compiler do not _interact_, rather the compiler just acts on the statements in the source file. The source file may contain some precompiler directives (#ifdef, #include, etc) or compiler directives. Programming language imperative statements are translated to machine code (or perhaps first to assembler, then to machine language). The machine code could be an add, load register, library call, system call, etc. Declarative statements tell the compiler to reserve memory, initialize memory, equate addresses, etc. -- Paul Almquist paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Eau Claire, WI USA
