Re: Interpreter for old basic programs from the line number era

Eric expounded in news:f1e8dd88-0800-4725-98ee-8ad4fa188ee5
@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Mar 6, 5:26 pm, Guy Macon <http://www.guymacon.com/>
wrote:
>> >There's Cheesecake BASIC V 3 that does.
>> >http://noktosoft.megafolio.com/
>>
>> Now that is cool! "Cheesecake BASIC is written in BASIC, and
>> can be compiled with the PowerBasic Console Compiler (2.0 or
>> above), with QuickBASIC 4.5, or with Cheesecake BASIC V3"
...
> Remember that the term Virtual Machine is just a fancy term that means
> the runtime interpreter that executes the p-code instructions. "cvm"
> is the Cheesecake virtual machine. Once this is compiled it is called
> the "RTL".
...
> Eric

Interesting reading.

WRT to VMs, I've always found that term, at least in its modern usage, to 
be a bit of a "marketing amusement". GW-Basic for example, also 
interpreted its own "tokenised program format" a long time ago:

  see http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~af380/GW-BASIC-tokens.html

Many other interpreted basics do something similar. I am also sure that 
there were many many earlier examples of this technique.

Wikipedia states ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_machine
) that 
the term was "originally defined by Popek and Goldberg as an efficient, 
isolated duplicate of a real machine. Current use includes virtual 
machines which have no direct correspondence to any real hardware."

I can't recall if JVM was based on any real hardware. I seem to recall 
Sun was making some noise about JVM hardware at one time. But I suspect 
that in Java's case, Java byte code came long before any real hardware 
ever existed.

Warren.

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