Re: Design of Virtual Machines

Dave <D.C.Page@massey.ac.nz> writes [in part]:
>> I am interested in the design of virtual machines, their
architecture,
>> instructions sets, the context they were uses in, interpreters and so
>> on.
>>
>> I would greatly appreciate any references to papers/books/web sites
>> etc which cover the background and use of VMs.


Just noting that VMs are not new; they have been here since the 1950s
(at least). An early one would be the "Bell Lab Interpreter" for the
IBM 650. As I recall, it defined a three address virtual machine,
while the 650 was a two address machine (where the 2nd address was
usually the address of the next instruction).
[Quite true, before compilers came along, there were a bunch of these
higher-level machine like codes that provided features not available in
hardware, e.g., floating point arithmetic and I/O conversions. -John]
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