definition of a highlevel language?

[Dan Upton]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:22 PM,  <miller.paul.w at gmail.com> wrote:
> On May 26, 3:02 pm, notnorweg... at yahoo.se wrote:
>
>> what is crazy about it?
>
> To make, say, a Python machine fast, you'd have to optimize the hell
> out of the architecture, probably all the way down to the microcode
> level.  Thus, a hypothetical hardware-based Python machine would look
> very little like other, more conventional chips like x86 or ARM, for
> instance.  In fact, I suspect it'd look a lot like the CPython virtual
> machine on an instruction level.

I don't know if it would necessarily look like the CPython VM, except
for the decode stage (this being said without any knowledge of the
CPython implementation, but with more than I ever thought I'd know
about processor architecture/microarchitecture)--I guess it depends on
if you'd have to treat Python bytecode instructions as CISC and then
would want to convert them to micro-ops to execute.  I don't know
about the LISP machine, but I know that many if not all of the
attempted implementations of Java machines really just ran Java
bytecode as its native instruction set.  (I assume they did some
optimizations though to actually use registers rather than treating it
as a stack machine, or maybe they just had a register stack.)

The point about them looking very little like x86/ARM/etc chips is the
important part though--IIRC, part of the failure of Java machines was
lousy support for preexisting code, due to the optimizations for Java
bytecode, and I expect the same would be true of a Python
bytecode-optimized processor.