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

On 3/18/08 3:52 PM, in article
Xns9A65A9BDEA2B5SnarkCharmedImSure@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 "Charmed Snark"
<snark@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

> 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.

Google UCSD Pascal. It was byte-code, for a virtual machine. UCSD Pascal
involved porting an interpreter written to each processor. The environment
(OS) was written in itself. It compiled to p-code (one of the first uses
of
this terminology).

If you Google Java, you will often find references to UCSD Pascal.

And there was a version of UCSD Pascal (III) that was implemented in
hardware.