Interpreter Plugins

Craig Latta latta at interval.com
Mon Apr 13 19:18:50 UTC 1998


	Jecel writes:

> My idea for a more modular primitive system is that we should pick
> a more object-oriented style and have primitive *objects* instead
> of primitive *methods*.

	Reinier responds:

> I like this. In this way one defines the virtual computer/machine.
> Almost all hardware processors have an arithmetic unit, a logic
> unit and sometimes a floating point unit. Memory comes in
> many flavors: registers, cache...

	One of the reasons I use Smalltalk is that it *hides* all this stuff (without making it inaccessible). Why promote it to ever higher levels? And as far as I do have to think about the hardware, I prefer to think of an idealized machine which I can use regardless of the actual hardware (a "virtual machine").

	In the interests of programming simplicity and consistency across diverse hardware, I think it's a win to keep the hardware interconnect at the lowest possible level, and as small as possible.


-C





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