Xref: utzoo comp.lang.c:11368 comp.arch:5534 Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!ll-xn!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!pardo From: pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.arch Subject: Programmed code generation: Native vs. Pcode Message-ID: <5308@june.cs.washington.edu> Date: 16 Jul 88 23:52:09 GMT References: <3353@cognos.UUCP> <619@goofy.megatest.UUCP> <429@uwovax.uwo.ca> <12381@ut-sally.UUCP> <1108@ficc.UUCP> <23944@bu-cs.BU.EDU> Reply-To: pardo@cs.washington.edu (David Keppel) Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle Lines: 17 In article <23944@bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes: >Did I miss something critical here? Most lisp systems generate and >execute there own machine code. Many Lisp (Prolog, Smalltalk, ...) systems generate a pseudocode rather than native instructions. The p-code is run by an an interpreter rather than the hardware. Thus, as far as the hardware is concerned, it is only the interpreter and NOT the p-code that is being executed. A number of more sophisticated Lisp systems DO generate native code for themselves (as opposed to Lisp systems where you compile an program to native code and once you start it, you can't load any more compiled code). These systems, however, are typically targeted for particular machines (e.g., InterLisp for Xerox Dandylions) and thus it is "safe" to make assumptions about the target hardware. ;-D on ( Me and my big segment ) Pardo