Re: What's the spec for emacs lisp virtual machine ?

[Barry Margolin]

In article 
<61a26ed5-80eb-4175-b7c4-162a1ce21a59@e5g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
 Fren Zeee <frenzeee@gmail.com> wrote:

> portability does not require VM, it only requires C while emacs
> interprets the lisp code. a diff command in C is portable over
> computers because its written in C. not because of a VM.

An interpreter *is* a VM.  The "machine language" of this VM is the 
language being interpreted.

Maybe what you're really asking is whether we need byte code?  That's 
just an optimization.  Compiling to machine code is even more of an 
optimization, but then the result is not portable.  So a byte code VM is 
a compromise between source code interpretation and machine code 
compilation.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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