Almost OT: How can that be?

From: Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com <(Philip.Belben_at_pgen.com)>
Date: Fri Jan 15 08:43:59 1999

>> Oh, and when I called it an "interpreter," that's a misnomer. It may
look,
>> walk, talk, and smell like an interpreter, but it's actually a JIT
compiler
>> in disguise... that's why it's so darned fast in comparison to an
interpreter.
>
> Actually, it compiles to an internal byte code that can be interpreted
> faster than parsing text, much like Forth or even Java.
In my experience, very few interpreters actually parse text in real time.
Every BASIC I've used AFAIK reduces keywords to byte codes at the time of
entry, and some actually encode numbers etc. at the same time.

Notable exception: I think REXX parses text in real time, or did when I
used it under VM/CMS.



Philip.
Received on Fri Jan 15 1999 - 08:43:59 GMT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:32:06 BST