At 10:35 97/08/27, D. tweed wrote:
>.. From what I've read, the JVM is designed to be a
>platform independent machine code which:
>
>I) is quickly and efficiently mappable onto a variety of real
>architectures.
>II) is optimised for representing Java programs and in particular:
>III)is designed to be quickly checkable for security concerns (during the
>download phase). However this is based on the assumption that what is
>being processed is Java; instructions which are safe in the context of
>other languages may not qualify as safe for the JVM.
First note that i above is ambiguous: An efficient mapping onto several
real architectures need not be distributed, and the latter steals
efficiency. Simon L Peyton Jones is working on "C--" bytecodes which are
not distributed, but can be used on several platforms.
>...
>Is there any mileage in trying to promote an additional, alternative
>virtual machine which still retains advantages I and III but has taken a
>step backwards so that it's more suitable for languages other than Java?
>(From looking at the Pizza mailing list, even Pizza (an extension to Java
>that allows higher order functions and lazy evaluation) has problems with
>simple, logical extensions which cause no conceptual problems but which
>just don't fit into the range of things the JVM is prepared to represent).
I have not followed the Pizza mailing list (how do you get Pizza in the
mail?).
But I think there is some theory needed to fill the gap.
Hans Aberg
* AMS member: Listing <http://www.ams.org/cml/>
* Email: Hans Aberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
