A back-and-forth engagement between a computer and the user. With programming languages, it refers to the execution of one line of code at a time. Contrast with executing a machine language program from beginning to end, or "script mode" in the case of an interpreted language run start to finish.
Interactive vs. Batch Mode
Most all applications that users experience today operate in an interactive mode, allowing them to select one option after another. In contrast, behind the scenes in the datacenter, many "batch" operations take place that are not interactive. See
interactive,
interpreter and
batch processing.