On 12/18/12 10:01 AM, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/18/2012 1:43 AM, Dmitry Olshansky wrote:
Compared to doing computations on AST tries (and looking up every name
in symbol
table?), creating fake nodes when the result is computed etc?
CTFE does not look up every (or any) name in the symbol table. I don't
see any advantage to interpreting bytecode over interpreting ASTs. In
fact, all the Java bytecode is is a serialized AST.
My understanding is that Java bytecode is somewhat lowered e.g. using a
stack machine for arithmetic, jumps etc. which makes it more amenable to
interpretation than what an AST walker would do. Also bytecode is more
directly streamable because you don't need any pointer fixups.
In brief I agree there's an isomorphism between bytecode and AST
representation, but there are a few differences that may be important to
certain applications.
Andrei
