language interpreters/ interpreted languages weaknesses?

[Phil Hunt]

In article <7qrce6$dgh$1 at news.bayarea.net>
           frankm at bayarea.net "Frank Mitchell" writes:
> Stephan Houben wrote in message ...
> >m.faassen at vet.uu.nl (Martijn Faassen) writes:
> >Of course, Sun marketed the fact that Java used bytecode as if it was
> >something revolutionary. "No, it is not interpreted, it is compiled to
> >Byte Code!" Of course, all those other languages which had been called
> >"interpreted" where actually compiled to byte code since the
> >beginning of time. Byte-code compilation is really as old as the Sun. ;-)
> 
> Right, but as the guy who hired me into Sun pointed out, it's the first time
> (AFAIK) that a byte code format has been fully specified and published, with
> the intent of transferring bytecode among different implementations.
> 
> If someone could point me to a previous bytecode format that worked in more
> implementations than the one that issued it, and stayed stable from revision
> to revision, I will stand corrected.

Pascal P-code?

> (Some languages are automatically
> disqualified: Perl, C-Python, Lua, and Tcl *have* only one implementation,)
> 
> Also, has the C-Python bytecode format has changed over time, such that old
> .pyc files had to be recompiled to work correctly?  I've only known Python
> for a year, and I've yet to see that problem.

IIRC, the JVM has changed since 1.0.

-- 
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