Dennis Lee Bieber wrote: > I'd consider that BASIC to be a fully interpreted language, as the > tokens are still a one-for-one equivalence of the source code. Python, > UCSD, and Java are not one-for-one, so on that basis, they fit the > definition of a compiled language...
That's an interesting definition which at least attempts to consider the issue from a perspective other than that which is concerned with whether hardware is in use, what kind of hardware, and so on. > The difficulty is that the target architecture in not realized in hardware. Or isn't perhaps feasible/viable for hardware realisation: one of the EuroPython speakers dangled the promise of hardware support for high-level languages (the classic "Python on a chip" concept), but there are probably plenty of areas where hardware support can assist software virtual machines without going to all the trouble of implementing such virtual machines in hardware completely. > And then... I believe the PowerPC chipset emulated the 680xx instruction set, > didn't it? There may have been some architectural overlap between PowerPC and M68K, but the PowerMacintosh computers used dynamic recompilation/translation software to execute legacy applications. In the case of CPython, the principal technological factor in determining how "interpreted" it is seems to be the complexity of the bytecode instructions, and I believe some work was done to investigate other instructions that might improve performance [2]. Were the most complex instructions replaced with simpler ones, a more performant implementation might be possible, although the work required to translate programs to such a simplified instruction set is very difficult indeed. On the subject of other virtual machine implementations, I wonder what happened to this one: http://effbot.org/zone/pytte.htm Fredrik? ;-) Paul [1] Theo F. de Ridder, "Enabling bare Python as universal connector for ad-hoc networks": http://www.python-in-business.org/ep2005/download.cpy?document=8912 (warning: huge presentation!) [2] Brett Cannon, "Localized Type Inference of Atomic Types in Python": http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~bac/thesis.pdf -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
