I mean... sed is Turing complete.  Yeah, it&#x27;s in the Turing tarpit, but if you were able to successfully translate Java to ES6 in a sed script, yes I would call that a compiler.  In a lot of ways, much of compiler theory is concerned with the best way to write a compiler (for many different optimization functions of &quot;best&quot;), not the only ways to do so.  Just being a crappy compiler doesn&#x27;t make it any less of a compiler.