Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!cmcl2!arizona!gudeman From: gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc Subject: Re: Icon Message-ID: <3507@megaron.arizona.edu> Date: 20 Jan 88 07:46:32 GMT Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson Lines: 29 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... > <> 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