I have for a long time been puzzled by such a simple thing as an Interpreter. My question is , to you people :

What is an interpreter and are there any resources online explaining interpretation ( without a VM )?

Thankyou in advance *sigh - people say this a lot*

This is a very simple concept. Your interpreter reads in a symbolic form and performs appropriate actions that it "thinks" these symbols indicate. A calculator program can be considered an interpreter.

Thanks , i'm not pushing the question too far , by asking if i person with a couple of years programming experience should be able to grasp the concepts of this. I wont ask the very stupid resources question ( unless someone knows any specific links ) as i have myself found plenty on google.com.

It depends on how complicated you want to make your interpreter. If I understand you correctly, you're thinking about scripting etc.

http://www.gamedev.net/reference/list.asp?categoryid=45#118
Here are a couple of articles explaining the basics (very simple scripts; including code examples)

If you want something more complicated, take a look at the mozilla JavaScript source (it's called Spider Monkey or something...) There's a lot of code though.

Thanks a lot, will do.I am thinking of scripting, so I'll have a look at some tutorials i've found.

www.flipcode.com/tutorials/ has a pretty neat little bit about writing an interpreter for a game engine. It uses a VM, but could quite easily be adapted.

I read a little about the early days of interpreted programming and the Pascal Virtual Machine.I suppose a VM really hardens things ... however there are GPLed VM's avalible,if my memory is not failing me.