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Even lots of BASICs, like Applesoft, were technically VMs with bytecode and even garbage collection. Not a retargetable VM, mind you.
by sehugg 10y ago
Even lots of BASICs, like Applesoft, were technically VMs with bytecode and even garbage collection. Not a retargetable VM, mind you.
- vidarh 10y agoI don't know about Apple's, but Microsofts BASIC was stored tokenized. I'd argue calling that "bytecode" would be stretching things a bit in that there was a direct 1-1 mapping between what was stored and the "raw" source format, because what was shown when you type "LIST" on e.g. the C64 was an expansion of the tokenized source. Personally at least I'd expect "bytecode" to usually refer to a more complicated and usually "lossy" remapping of instructions (e.g. at the very least throwing away comments and trimming identifiers (Microsoft BASIC only looked at the first few letters of an identifier to identify a variable, but stored the rest as part of the source)).