A historical question

[Carlos Ribeiro]

On Wed, 08 Sep 2004 11:59:38 -0400, Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote:
> Carlos Ribeiro wrote:
> > ... Even old
> > languages such as BASIC used to be compiled to some form of
> > intermediate code -- a similar concept to Python's bytecode, but much
> > simpler.
> 
> <snip>
>
> The only "compilation" that went on was actually called
> "tokenization", and that meant only that keywords such
> as PRINT were turned into single-byte values that corresponded
> directly to the keyword in the source.  

You're right -- I oversimplified my explanation to reinforce the fact
that few systems ever run the program directly from the source code,
as the original poster implied in his question. Tokenization is only
the first step. But as a generic (and simple) explanation, its result
is conceptually one step closer to Python's (or Java's) bytecode than
the original (textual) program source.


-- 
Carlos Ribeiro
Consultoria em Projetos
blog: http://rascunhosrotos.blogspot.com
blog: http://pythonnotes.blogspot.com
mail: carribeiro at gmail.com
mail: carribeiro at yahoo.com