On Thursday 04 December 2003 11:21 am, Thomas A Petersen wrote:
> Perhaps I should have used the word simulated or something.  After
> observing Java and other efforts, it is clear that Smalltalk's refinement
> of the byte code execution process is far more refined than anything else
> out there.
>
> By interpreted I meant that the byte codes are not one to one with the
> underlying processor's instruction set.  As has been previously discussed
> on this list and other places, that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Though this is the case with Squeak (mostly) it's not the case with all the 
other Smalltalks.

There are a number of Smalltalks that do a just-in-time translation to machine 
code.

Smalltalk MT (a Windows Smalltalk) compiles natively to machine code.

There's nothing in Smalltalk that requires a bytecode interpreter (just as 
there is nothing that forces Java to run this way).