You're right that method invocations aren't simply a table lookup or pointer dereference, but in the end it boils down to a jump to the address of some all read

You're right that method invocations aren't simply a table lookup or pointer dereference, but in the end it boils down to a jump to the address of some all ready compiled (machine) code which is what I was trying to make a point of. For C#, the execution process is C# -> compiler -> CIL bytecode at compile time. Then at runtime CIL bytecode -> JIT -> machine code. So sure, C# (and I believe Java is similar to C# in this regard) eventually gets compiled to machine code, but it's vastly different from what I believe to be the accepted usage of being a "compiled language." The exception to this being if you AOT compile your code, but in that case you lose sacrifice some language functionality.