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Published in:
2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
3. Assembly Language
Author : Kent D. Lee
Published in: Foundations of Programming Languages
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Abstract
Python is an object-oriented, interpreted language. Internally to the Python interpreter, a Python program is converted to bytecode and interpreted using a virtual machine. Most modern programming languages have support for high-level abstractions while the instructions of a virtual machine are closer to the machine language instructions supported by hardware architectures, making the interpretation of bytecode easier than interpretation of the original source program. The advantage of virtual machine implementations results from dividing the mapping from high-level abstractions to low-level machine instructions into two parts: high-level abstractions to bytecode and bytecode to machine instructions.