Compiler

The term compiler was defined by the U.S. Copyright Office as “[t]o prepare a machine language program from a computer program written in another programming language by making use of the overall logic structure of the program, or generating more than one machine instruction for each symbolic statement, or both, as well as performing the function of an assembler.”

Source code versions of computer programs are typically complied into and sold as object code[[ or [[machine language versions of those programs.