[TUHS] Compilation "vs" byte-code interpretation, was Re: Looking back to 1981 - what pascal was popular on what unix?
Erik E. Fair
fair-tuhs at netbsd.org
Tue Feb 1 06:00:40 AEST 2022
The definitions and boundaries between:
Instruction Set Architecture (usually hardware, but see Webasm)
P-code/bytecode interpreter internal instructions (e.g. Pascal, Java)
Register Transfer Languages (RTL - compilers)
seem awfully ... fuzzy. Are there any hard & fast rules for classifying particular implementations into taxnomical categories? Wikipedia has an over-arching definition for "intermediate representation" ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermediate_representation
This is related to Unix in that Unix itself (both kernel system call API & C library) is an abstracting intermediary between the hardware (whole computer system including storage, networking), and application software, which "if written portably" doesn't have to care what hardware it's run on, so long as that hardware meets some minimum requirements for both Unix, and whatever the application's needs are.
Erik
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