At 10:44 AM 12/8/00 -0500, Sam Tregar wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Dec 2000, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
> > I already knew that "writing the canonical Perl6 implementation in Java was
> > likely a lost cause. ;) However, I hope we won't confuse this issue
> with the
> > one of making it possible to port Perl to non-C environments. Such
> > environments do exist, and they do matter, IMO.
>
>I'm a jerk, so I have to ask: do they exist? What platform are you
>talking about where there exists a JVM and where no C compiler can target
>the architecture? How did they write the JVM with no C compiler?
Sun's got a chip where java bytecode *is* the assembly language, and that
chip's being used in a number of places. There are also a small (and
growing) number of hand-held devices where there is a JVM available in
addition to the native assembly language, and it'd be easier to move a perl
program compiled to java bytecode over to the device than it would either
write a back-end to emit the device's native machine language or port the
perl bytecode execution engine over.
So, yes, there are a bunch of places where java would be available but C
wouldn't.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
