One person’s interpreted is another person’s excuted.
Did you know that an Intel processor intreprets the X86 instruction set using
firmware that is running on dedicated hardware plus a risc like core?
The answer to the question is that from a python point of view the python
statements are compiled into byte code and its is the byte code that is executed.
Maybe the person claiming python is line by line is assuming that there are not optimisations that will “seem” to execute out of order. But I do not think that that
is sort of optimisation is not allowed.
Python is actually executions statement by statement, which may be nested within statements, or on a more fine-grained level, logical-line by logical-line, each of which may be multiple physical lines.