Source code is a computer file that contains a set of instructions that tells the computer what to do.

Source code is written in one of many “computer languages”. A computer language is an artificial language that allows people to write instructions in a way that they can understand, yet still easily convert the instructions to “machine code” that the computer can understand. A special kind of program that converts source code to machine code is called a “compiler”. Some languages convert source code to an intermediate form and execute it a little bit at a time, instead of converting the entire source code file in advance. A special kind of program that does this instead is called an “interpreter”.

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