In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Donn Cave <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > I agree that there are many shades of grey here, but there's also a > > real black that's sharply distinct and easy to find -- real native > > code binaries are not interpreted. > > Except when they are. Many machines are microcoded, which means your > "real native code binary" is interpreted by a microcode program stored > in the control store. Most machines don't have a writeable control > store (WCS), so you generally can't change the interpreter, but that's > not always true. In the simple case, a WCS lets the vendor fix > "hardware" bugs by providing a new version of the microcode. In the > extreme cases, you get OS's in which the control store is part of the > process state, so different processes can have radically different > formats for their "native code binaries". > > Then there's the Nanodata QM-1, whose microcode was interpreted by > "nanocode". Fine -- given a Python Chip computer, Python programs are native code. It can use microcode, if that helps. The VAX/11 microcode was just a software extension of the CPU hardware, implementing some extra instructions, the way I remember it. I don't recall that it was of any more than academic interest to anyone using the computer - though it may have been software in a sense, it was on the hardware side of the wall. On the software side of the wall, if your program can go over the wall by itself, then it's native. Donn Cave, [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
