In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution: 1. * Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly; 2. * Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this; 3. * Explicitly execute stored precompiled code made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system.