Yes, I think "virtual machine" is too loaded of a term now and is just confusing the point? An NFA implementation can be "virtual" in the sense of "virtual mem

Yes, I think "virtual machine" is too loaded of a term now and is just confusing the point? An NFA implementation can be "virtual" in the sense of "virtual memory" being virtual. It is a pretense of a practically unbounded set of states while really being bounded like any other practical implementation. It grows on demand and can handle many practical inputs while possibly hitting its implementation limits on a worst-case input.