Interpreter

An interpreter, like a compiler, translates high-level language into low-level machine language. The difference lies in the way they read the source code or input.

1) A compiler reads the whole source code at once, creates tokens, checks semantics, generates intermediate code, executes the whole program and may involve many passes.
 In contrast, an interpreter reads a statement from the input, converts it to an intermediate code, executes it, then takes the next statement in sequence. If an error occurs, an interpreter stops execution and reports it. whereas a compiler reads the whole program even if it encounters several errors.

Python is an interpreter based language. Though it creates .pyc files, when imported or executed with py_compile() function, it results in compiled byte code. This byte code is python-specific and not machine-specific.

How your python code gets executed?

The python code you write is compiled into python bytecode, which creates file with extension .pyc. If compiles, again question is, why not compiled language.

Note that this isn't compilation in the traditional sense of the word. Typically, we’d say that compilation is taking a high-level language and converting it to machine code. But it is a compilation of sorts. Compiled in to intermediate code not into machine code (Hope you got it Now).

Back to the execution process, your bytecode, present in pyc file, created in compilation step, is then executed by appropriate virtual machines, in our case, the CPython VM (actually we call it interpreter, right?).

Execution of Python Code