A historical question

[John Bauman]

"Duncan Booth" <duncan.booth at invalid.invalid> wrote in message 
news:Xns955E8441C8304duncanrcpcouk at 127.0.0.1...
> Jerald <jfj at freemail.gr> wrote in news:chmphe$21tc$1 at ulysses.noc.ntua.gr:
>
<snip original post>
>
> According to Google, in April 1994 Guido posted complaining about some of 
> the
> inefficiencies in the bytecode interpreter:
>
> http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?selm=9404120719.AA03729%3Dguido%40voorn.cwi.nl
>
> I doubt very much whether there has ever been any implemention of Python 
> that
> didn't use a bytecode of some form. It would be a very perverse way to try 
> to
> write a language.

>From some things I read about Parrot, I'm under the impression that Ruby 
(and Perl, partially) don't (yet) use bytecodes (at least internally - they 
may be used as an external representation).  Instead, the program is parsed 
into an abstract syntax tree and the program is interpreted by walking the 
tree.  See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpreted_language . The same 
method would probably work with Python.