I have however been accused of being an indirectionaholic in past, but
the newer runtime systems have shown I can have my cake and eat it too
so I'm not backing down on that one anytime soon :-)
I agree completely with this. I do however think there's a class of
'pascal sized' applications that could be written in Java instead, and
finding creative solutions to the optimisation problems sounds like a
really fun academic exercise. There's certainly room to do far better
than the p-machine implementations did!
I would love to see a serious attempt made. But don't underestimate
the effort put into optimizing the p-system. They achieved most of
their objectives (which many regarded as impossible at the time) and
only failed to achieve their non-objectives. ;-)
We've learned a few things since then, but we've forgotten so much.. ;-)
Oh, I doubt it's possible to get more than a few percent improvement
out of the interpreters execution speed. Certainly big chunks of the
OS itself could do with an overhaul, but one of the advantages of
going for the JVM approach would be building it from scratch to run
under ProDOS (and possibly be able to relocate itself into the
Auxiliary Language Card *hint hint*)
I think the really interesting improvements would come from a runtime
profiler/compiler that applied all the the feasible dynamic
optimisations.