🚀 go-pugleaf

In article  <2506@encore.UUCP> pierson@encore.UUCP (Dan Pierson) writes:
>In article <3473@megaron.arizona.edu> gudeman@arizona.edu goofs:
>>...the Icon translator converts from Icon source code to a virtual
>>machine code that is run by an interpreter.  Most "compiled" lisps
>>work the same way.
>
>Uhm, not quite true...
>	<<discussion of lisp implementations>>

I guess this is a good time to admit that the only lisp implementation
I know anything about is GNU elisp which is compiled into virtual
machine code.  I'm afraid I was making unwarranted assumptions based
on my experience with Prolog implementations.

Incidentally, you mention that portability and low maintenance are
advantages to virtual machine code; another advantage is the small
size of the object code files.  For applications where space is
scarce, this could be important.  However I suspect that the biggest
advantage of this is for programs/systems where the time to load a
program is longer than the execution time of the program.  For such
applications, virtual machine code programs might load-and-execute
noticeably faster than native machine code.  (Assuming the interpreter
is already in memory.)
					David Gudeman

					    Department of Computer Science
gudeman@arizona.edu			    Gould-Simpson Science Building
{allegra,cmcl2,ihnp4,noao}!arizona!gudeman  The University of Arizona
602-621-2858				    Tucson, AZ 85721