Indeed, according to "The Most Important Software Innovations" [1]: In computer programming, “a pseudo-code or p-code machine is a specification of a CPU whose

Indeed, according to "The Most Important Software Innovations" [1]: In computer programming, “a pseudo-code or p-code machine is a specification of a CPU whose instructions are expected to be executed in software rather than in hardware (ie, interpreted).” Basic Combined Programming Language (BCPL) is a computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966. He developed a way to make it unusually portable, by splitting the compiler into two parts: a compiler into an intermediate pseudo-code (which he called O-code), and a back-end that translated that into the actual machine code. Since the intermediate code could be exchanged between arbitrary machines, it enabled portability. Urs Ammann, a student of Wirth’s at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, used the same approach in the 1970s to implement Pascal; this intermediate pseudo-machine code was called p-code, and popularized the technique (see Wirth’s “Recollections about the development of Pascal” ) Java is based on this fundamental approach, which enables compiled code to be run unchanged on different computer architectures (see “Java’s Forgotten Forbear”). Even many text adventure games have been built with this approach, most famously the Z-machine used to implement many Infocom games (such as Zork). BCPL also significantly influenced the C programming language, including its use of curly brackets {...}. No patent identified. [1] https://dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html https://dwheeler.com/innovation/innovation.html