title: About the assertion "Your ruby code is never translated into machine language"
body: <p>I'm reading the book Ruby under a Microscope, and I don't understand the quoted part in the second chapter: </p>
  
  <p>From what I've understood, the process to run a ruby program is roughly the following</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Read the file and tokenize it</p></li>
  <li><p>Using grammar rules, transform those tokens into instructions in an Abstract Syntax Tree.</p></li>
  <li><p>Walking through the nodes, transform them into YARV bytecode (this step is called compiling?).</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>And this last one is the one that troubles me</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>"Ruby never compiles your Ruby code all the way to machine language.
  [...] Ruby interprets the bytecode instructions."</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>My question is, for those bytecode instructions to be understood and executed, shouldn't I need to translate them into assembly/machine code before? If not, how does the machine understand them?</p>