🚀 go-pugleaf

andrew@williaj.demon.co.uk (Andrew J. Williams) wrote:

>hraiser@cloud9.net wrote:

>>Chung Hong (chungh@Hawaii.Edu) wrote:
>>: So what?  VB will still be a messed up mutated language with severe limits
>>: and incredibly frustrating to use, especially when compared with the other
>>: development tools out there like Delphi.  If you've used VB and Delphi both,
>>: you'd realize that VB has much deeper problems than what including a new
>>: VB-compiler will be able to resolve. 

>>  No compiler can compensate for a weak, cumbersome, limited language like
>>(Viusal) Basic.  Delphi has an excellent environment, but nothing on heaven
>>or Earth can make me go back to coding Pascal.  Smart money is on Latte,
>>Borland's upcoming Java based programming environment, based on the Delphi
>>front end.


>Isn't Java an interpreted language?

My 2 cents' worth of HO on this last one:

Yes, but maybe not on all platforms. Someone is apparently
planning to make a Java chip. Shades of UCSD Pascal! Someone
made a chip for its p-code too. Wasn't it Western Digital?
(or what was going by that name at the time).

But pretty soon mainstream CPU chips will probably have big
paged caches where you can lock in an interpreter as easily
as you lock a segment in ordinary memory now. Then the difference
between interpreted and not will fade and become a matter of
who designed the best byte code instruction set for the job at hand.

Also, there are situations where interpreted bytecode can actually
go faster than HLL compiled to native machine language, strange
and contradictory as that might seem. E.g., when you call Format in
Delphi, you are running a little interpreter for the format string.
This can be faster or slower than doing the separate conversions
and string concatenations yourself, depending on how optimized
the interpreter is (i.e., if it just turns around and makes the
same calls you were going to do, there is no gain, but otherwise
you have effectively used an interpreter to avoid overhead).

Regards,
Bengt Richter