Regarding: "words still mean something in the context of language implementation" Since nobody mentioned it before, the primary advantages of interpreters in t

Regarding: "words still mean something in the context of language implementation" Since nobody mentioned it before, the primary advantages of interpreters in the field of pldi are: - ease of implementation - portability This has very important implications to the field of interpreter optimizations, too, since most of them are relatively easy to implement and portable. The ease of implementation advantage when compared to an optimizing native code compiler is usually very big, the same holds true for JIT compilers as well. Portability again is a nice thing to have for optimizations--particularly when compared to the portability of JITs, which need a dedicated native code generating backend for every supported architecture.