language interpreters/ interpreted languages weaknesses?

[Fredrik Lundh]

Frank Mitchell <frankm at bayarea.net> wrote:
> 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.

how about 8080 assembler ;-)

if we're talking bytecodes in the more classic sense,
Sun's JVM spec says:

    "the best-known virtual machine may
    be the P-Code machine of UCSD Pascal"

(alright, I'm sure some will claim that Java is "more
fully specified" and has stayed "more stable" than
anything else, but it's obvious that the idea isn't
new...)

</F>