I am new to the Python programming language. I was wondering if it is possible to compile a program to written in Python.
Is it possible to convert Python scripts to some lower level programming languages which then can be compiled to binary code?
A developer who is considering to code in Python might want to keep the possibility open to be able to go for binary distribution later.
Python, as a dynamic language, cannot be "compiled" into machine code statically, like C or COBOL can. You'll always need an interpreter to execute the code, which, by definition in the language, is a dynamic operation.
You can "translate" source code in bytecode, which is just an intermediate process that the interpreter does to speed up the load of the code, It converts text files, with comments, blank spaces, words like 'if', 'def', 'in', etc in binary code, but the operations behind are exactly the same, in Python, not in machine code or any other language. This is what it's stored in .pyc files and it's also portable between architectures.
Probably what you need it's not "compile" the code (which it's not possible) but to "embed" an interpreter (in the right architecture) with the code to allow running the code without an external installation of the interpreter. To do that, you can use all those tools like py2exe or cx_Freeze.
Maybe I'm being a little pedantic on this :-P
Is it possible to compile a program written in Python?