Re: Interpreter design

  "Venkatesha Murthy" <gvmt@localhost.vsnl.net.in> writes:
>But then HOC was amenable to a stack computer. Is every interpreted
>language that way? Runnable on a stack computer?


No. First of all, there are other interpreters than virtual machine
(VM) interpreters, e.g., string or tree interpreters. And even among
the VM interpreters, there are VM instruction sets that are not
similar to stack machine instruction sets, e.g., the WAM variants used
in Prolog implementations, which are more like register machines.


The reasons for using stack-based VMs are:


1) It's easy to generate code for them from most languages; generating
fewer instructions for a register VM takes quite a bit of effort.


2) Register-based VM instructions take longer to interpret (decoding
and accessing the VM registers takes time), so this pays off only if
there are significantly fewer instructions. Section 2.3 of the
following paper gives some examples.


@InProceedings{ertl95pldi,
    author = "M. Anton Ertl",
    title = "Stack Caching for Interpreters",
    crossref = "sigplan95",
    pages = "315--327",
    url = "http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/papers/ertl95pldi.ps.gz"
}


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

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