On Saturday 5 June 2010, Doug Ewell <[email protected]> wrote:
> In particular, both ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 and the Unicode Consortium and its
> Technical Committee have the right to decide that executable machine
> languages are not in scope for ISO/IEC 10646 and the Unicode Standard.
Your sentence states what it states. However, for the avoidance of doubt, I
wonder if I may please mention that I am suggesting the encoding of a portable
interpretable object code into Unicode not executable machine languages. An
immediate difference between the two is the singular rather than the plural,
yet the reason that I have written this post is because a portable
interpretable object code is not the same thing as an executable machine
language. Now, certainly, some writers about microprocessors have used the
phrase object code to mean exactly the same as machine code. However, I do not
do that. In computing generally, source code can be compiled to produce object
code and object code then linked to subroutines from a library and converted
into machine code so as to produce an executable program. Often these days the
two processes are carried out sequentially without the end user being aware
that two processes are taking place.
This portable interpretable object code has some features of a high level
language, such as while loops and repeat loops and also it does not have a jump
instruction.
Programs in this portable interpretable object code could be written from a
text editor or could be produced in special authoring software or produced as
the output of a compiler from source code in either an assembler level language
or a high level language.
The portable interpretable object code would be interpreted rather than being
used to produce a machine code executable program.
William Overington
7 June 2010
