Mike Meyer wrote: > Donn Cave <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >>I agree that there are many shades of grey here, but there's also a >>real black that's sharply distinct and easy to find -- real native >>code binaries are not interpreted. > > > Except when they are. Many machines are microcoded, which means your > "real native code binary" is interpreted by a microcode program stored > in the control store. Most machines don't have a writeable control > store (WCS), so you generally can't change the interpreter, but that's > not always true. In the simple case, a WCS lets the vendor fix > "hardware" bugs by providing a new version of the microcode. In the > extreme cases, you get OS's in which the control store is part of the > process state, so different processes can have radically different > formats for their "native code binaries". > > Then there's the Nanodata QM-1, whose microcode was interpreted by > "nanocode".
Or the transmeta processor, that emulated x86 ops. Diez -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
