From LQWiki
A compiler is a program that translates human-readable source code into machine-readable binary code. In some programming languages like Java, after a program is compiled it still requires an interpreter in order to execute the resulting bytecode. Usually, though, the compiled code will run on its own. In Linux, this is ELF format for modern binaries (replacing the older a.out format) - MS Windows uses their own PE COFF format.
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