(slightly OT): Python and linux - very cool

[holger krekel]

hello mart,

Mart van de Wege wrote:
> On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 11:25:16 +0200, Michael Hudson wrote:
> 
> > Mart van de Wege <mvdwege.usenet at drebbelstraat20.dyndns.org> writes:
> <lots of misunderstandings about the Python VM>
> > 
> > And this has been the case in Python for, more-or-less, ever.  If
> > you're knowledge is out of date, then you must have known Python circa
> > version 0.9 (and I don't know if that interpreted a parse tree -- I
> > just know it was different).
> > 
> Euhm, I meant to say that Python's VM was similarly high-level like
> Perl's. The parse-tree comment was meant to apply to the Perl VM. Sorry if
> I was a little unclear there.

at least perl 5.6 doesn't have a 'virtual machine'.  It uses the parse
tree for substitution/execution.  Of course you could call anything
that is interpreted (as a perl-script is) call 'virtual'. But commonly
only python and java are considered having VMs.  With perl6 in the
distant future this might change.

> I am not up to compiler theory and VM design. I know three types of
> languages: Assembly (6502), C, and highlevel (Perl and Python mostly), so
> it's obvious I can be a little unclear in these cases.
> 
> Thanks for clarifying things to me. Obviously, despite the design
> difference, Perl and Python have a higher-level VM than Java, right? 

ASAIK perl has parsetree-based execution/substitution.  Note that perl 
probably has no way of accessing the 'parse-tree'. A bad (de-) sign.

I-am-no-perl-expert-but-know-some :-)'ly yours, holger