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000028_icon-group-sender _Mon May 22 12:56:57 2000.msg
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by baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU (8.9.1a/8.9.1) id MAA14412
for icon-group-addresses; Mon, 22 May 2000 12:56:46 -0700 (MST)
Message-Id: <200005221956.MAA14412@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU>
To: corre@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (Alan D Corre)
cc: icon-group@optima.CS.Arizona.EDU
Subject: Re: Is Anyone Working On A Unicode Version Of Icon?
User-Agent: EMH/1.10.0 SEMI/1.13.7 (Awazu) FLIM/1.13.2 (Kasanui) Emacs/20.6 (mips-dec-ultrix4.4) MULE/4.0 (HANANOEN)
Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 20:32:06 +0100
From: "Olivier Lecarme" <ol@i3s.unice.fr>
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>>>>> Regarding Re: Is Anyone Working On A Unicode Version Of Icon?; corre@alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (Alan D Corre) adds:
ADC> In article <200005171922.MAA09657@baskerville.CS.Arizona.EDU> Cary Coutant
ADC> <cary@cup.hp.com> writes:
>>
>> At the time, I was just copying the idea of a bytecode interpreter from
>> the Pascal p-system. Little did I realize that Sun had yet to "invent"
>> bytecode!
ADC> This prompts me to ask a question that has been bothering me for some time,
ADC> and to which I would appreciate a reply that is not overly technical. I used
ADC> Apple Pascal what seems like eons ago. It was a really nice system, invented
ADC> by Ken Bowles, if I remember correctly. My question is, why is there so much
ADC> fuss about Java working across different platforms? Was not the p-system a
ADC> "virtual machine" which could function in just that way?
Pcode was not invented by Ken Bowles at all. It was only the result of a
practical project by three or four undergraduate students of Niklaus
Wirth in Zurich Polytechnicum. The Pcode-generating compiler and Pcode
interpreter, both written in Pascal of course, were first published in
two working documents of the Zurich Computer Science Department
(characteristic small yellow booklets; I should still have them at
work).
Since it was public domain, Ken Bowles managed to make money with the
idea, without ever acknowledging his debt to the Zurich team. He did not
ever attempt to complete the compiler, which did not implement some
features considered too complicated, like procedural parameters for
example. The unimplemented features of this compiler managed to remain
intact in Borland Turbo-Pascal, but that is another history...
Anyway, this is simply one more example of the perpetual re-inventing of
the wheel. It works very well when people no longer remember that the
wheel has been in use for years. Thus, most of the fuss about Java
virtual machine, portability by interpretation, bytecode and so on, is
completely unjustified, since there is nothing new in this approach.
The authors of the initial idea are Niklaus Wirth, his assistant Urs
Amman, and the student team, whose names I can retrieve in a few days.
Of course, language implementation by interpretation is much older, and
comes back to the very first programming languages.
--
Olivier Lecarme