Well okay, but then why privilege the distinction between VM and hardware? They're both targeted architectures after all. I think a critical distinquishing characteristic of an interpreted language is that the stages of lexing/parsing/emitting VM specific code/runtime are not strictly separate from one another, but the program can move between them at will via the likes of eval. In Java the separation of those steps is enforced not just in the de facto separation of tools, but in the way the language is intended to work. You compile, and only then do you run.