---
title: "Interpreter"
url: "https://www.pulumi.com/dev/glossary/interpreter/"
image: "https://www.pulumi.com/assets/og/dev/glossary/interpreter.png"
---

# Interpreter

A tool that translates source code in a higher-level language into a lower-level
language for execution, line-by-line, at runtime. JavaScript, Lisp, and Ruby are
examples of interpreted languages. Technically, Python is compiled to bytecode
before being interpreted by CPython.