A historical question

[Greg Ewing]

Peter Hansen wrote:
> The only "compilation" that went on was actually called
> "tokenization" ... was more for memory conservation
> than for anything else.

It undoubtedly helped execution speed a lot, too.
The main loop of the interpreter consisted of fetching
the next token and consulting a jump table -- much
like the switch statement in ceval().

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg