language interpreters/ interpreted languages weaknesses?

[Jean Jordaan]

On Sat, 4 Sep 1999 08:09:29 -0700, Frank Mitchell <frankm at bayarea.net> wrote:
>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. 

Z-code! That's the bytecode of the Infocom text adventure engine. Infocom
wrote Z-code engines for all their target machines, and released one version
of the bytecode of the games for all of them. It's been implemented as Inform 
by Graham Nelson, and ported all over the place. Does this qualify :?

--jean