I'd figure at least from the perspective of the JVM and the CLR, you'd have less of an impedance mismatch on a stack machine. And with most compiled languages

I'd figure at least from the perspective of the JVM and the CLR, you'd have less of an impedance mismatch on a stack machine. And with most compiled languages being conceptually very stack-y, I doubt it would hurt there either. That, and you could save on instruction bandwidth since the operands could be implicit stack offsets instead of having to be specified in the instruction. (I believe Moore's GreenArray chips packed four instructions to the word.) It might be a dead-end, or there could be some serious potential that is just being overlooked. Everyone is so accustomed to register machines (CISC or RISC) these days that it may be a while before the idea is reevaluated. edit: Sorry! Just read this back, and realized I just repeated what you wrote in different words.