definition of a highlevel language?

[Dan Upton]

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 5:06 PM, Paul Miller <none at this.time> wrote:
> On Mon, 26 May 2008 15:49:33 -0400, Dan Upton wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:22 PM,  <miller.paul.w at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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)
>
> Out of curiosity, do you know how easy it would be to make a Python chip
> using FPGAs?  I have little to no hardware knowledge, but it sounds like
> a fun project in any case.  Even if it's not likely to have blazing
> performance, it'd be cool to load Python bytecode directly into
> memory. :-)
>

I don't really know, but I would guess that it's hard, or at least
time-consuming.  The best example I can give you is "JOP: A Java
Optimized Processor" which was basically an FPGA-based chip that
executed Java bytecode natively.  If you're curious, you can read
about it at http://www.jopdesign.com/ .  It looks like it was done as
a PhD thesis at the Vienna University of Technology, and unless
Austria has significantly lower PhD requirements... ;)