Re: What is byte-code ?

"KC" <kcc1967@gmail.com> writes:
>What's the official definition of byte-code ?


There is none (well, you can try Wikipedia or FOLDOC for inofficial
definitions).


The term byte-code is typically used for a special case of a virtual
machine, where the virtual machine instructions and their operands are
encoded as bytes, or as groups of bytes (e.g., JVM byte-code,
Smalltalk byte-code, Elisp byte-code).


However, I have also seen the term used for virtual machines that
don't have this property (e.g., the Ocaml "byte-code", where the
instructions are encoded as machine words); that usage seems to just
use "byte-code" in place of "virtual machine" (maybe because there are
also other meanings of "virtual machine").


As for "virtual machine", in this context it means a flat, sequential
intermediate representation of the programs, consisting of virtual
machine instructions, with some similarities to real-machine code.


>Any documentation and
>book related to byte-code and byte-code compiler ?


@Book{krasner83,
    title = "Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice",
    publisher = "Addison-Wesley",
    year = 1983,
    editor = "Glen Krasner"
}


You can also look at some papers published at, e.g., IVME'04 and
follow the references.


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

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