clifto wrote:
Chuck Harris wrote:
Spice is an interpreter.

SPICE makes sense as an interpreter. Compilers are best for programs you
write once and use several times; interpreters are best for programs you
run once but write several of. If you consider every change to a circuit
to be a separate program you run once (which makes perfect sense when you
consider you would be recompiling it every time you made a change), and
you consider that once the circuit works to your liking you probably won't
be running that simulation often, then an interpreter is perfect for the
job and a compiler would be slow and inconvenient.

There is an additional, very important reason to use an interpreter:
Ease of debugging. An interpreter knows exactly what is happening in
all of the data spaces, indexes, jumps, subroutines, etc. at all times.
That factor makes it easy to debug. Interpreted languages, such as Python,
Perl, and apl have extensive debugging facilities available. Debugging with
a compiler is a much more complicated matter.

-Chuck