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in reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: New JAVA Specification
in thread New JAVA Specification

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.


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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: New JAVA Specification
by diotalevi (Canon) on Jun 18, 2003 at 06:20 UTC

    No... I think the VM provided by my hardware is a distinct enough component that it is a good place to draw one sort of dividing line. The distinction between compiler and execution environment is blurry when you consider the various non-(hardware)-machine code languages like Perl, Python and Java. I suppose if you wanted to be ultra pedantic you could note that hardware is also a VM because things like ix86 are actually an API to whatever the hardware actually executes which itself can be an API, etc.

    I don't think the meaningful thing is on whether the language has an eval-like construct. That is more about language design than it is about scripting language delineation. In fact, is there anything stoppping a person from implementing eval in Java? Certainly you can manipulate Java source code from within a Java program. You can execute the compiler - I'd just wonder if it is possible to load classes during runtime (and I suspect it is).