Re: Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Paul Schlyter wrote:

>In article <Xns939FA7E65252wildstar128hotmailco@216.168.3.44>,
>wildstar  <wildstar128@hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Excuse me, one has to first write/compile a JAVA compiler. It still 
>> requires interpretation during execution. Did you forget about the byte-
>> code interpretation. That is like converting tokens in token BASIC.
> 
>Note quite: Java bytecode is much closer to machine language than BASIC
>tokens.
> 
>Actually, even native machine code is interpreted -- by the hardware
>CPU.  If you want to look at some REAL machine code, then you'll have
>to look at the microcode om ROM's within many CPU's.

Or look at the machine code of a RISC machine, which directly
controls the hardware.

The elimination of microcode was one of the primary tenets of
RISC design.  (At HP, we added small bits of ordinary machine code
as interrupt routines to handle things like TLB misses, and we called
it "millicode" to emphasize that it was normal code performing a
role typically done by microcode in a CISC machine.  (BTW, this
code resided in normal memory, not ROM.)

-michael

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