So I was doing some lite reading before bed last night and a confusion arose:

Internally, and almost completely hidden from you, when you execute a program, Python first compiles your source code into a format known as byte code. Compilation is simply a translation step, and byte code is a lower-level, platform independent representation of your source code ....
By saying the byte code is 'platform-independent' is this saying that the code can now be run interpreter-free??

Put another way: Is the interpreter's function to translate from source code to byte code (this is all about Python language, of course) and then its done until the next new batch of code is run, its all up to the PVM after that?