[virtmach] Virtual Machines and Code Representation

[John R Levine]

> I've not been impressed with what I've seen of ANDF.  It doesn't seem to me
> to exploit the structure of abstract tree code very well.

Me neither.  Despite claims to the contrary by some of its authors, it's yet
another attempt at an UNCOL, a universal intermediate language, and it's
failed for the same reasons that every other UNCOL project has failed since
the original one in the 1950s, basically that we can't abstract either
language semantics or machine architecture well enough to avoid an impossible
morass of special case hacks in such a language. 

ANDF did an adequate job of representing C.  Of course, C already represents
itself just fine and dandy, so that's not very useful in practice. 

Regards,
John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://iecc.com/johnl, Sewer Commissioner
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