Jolyon > Raw byte code still needs to be interpreted - albeit translated to machine > ops (rather than interpreted in the sense that a scripted language is). > > Only a compiled exe is. well. a compiled exe.
You are on very shakey ground here, A compiler can optimise code based on the symbols passed to it, ie the object code need not resemble to structure of the source (famous story about benchmarks where the "compiler" totally removed the test loop as it realised the whole process was pointless) As for php, It it partially compiled afaik (partially compiled or tokenised) and I can't see why it could not be fully compiled to a native binary in the future (though in doing so you may sacrifice some of its portability) as an aside the original pascal implementations were similarly compiled into "P-Codes" whicn then ran on a target binary runtime. The results were pretty much as I expected Jave and C# introduce a VM overhead and php was propably 100% "interpreted" (actually parsed and run), I doubt they used an op code cache (such as apc) which can give 2 orders of magnatude code performance increase Neven _______________________________________________ NZ Borland Developers Group - Delphi mailing list Post: delphi@delphi.org.nz Admin: http://delphi.org.nz/mailman/listinfo/delphi Unsubscribe: send an email to delphi-requ...@delphi.org.nz with Subject: unsubscribe