On Jun 8, 2004, at 9:15 AM, Colin Putney wrote:

> The simplest, cleanest, most OO, way of executing code would be to 
> have the VM execute an AST directly.

I'm not convinced this is true: bytecode is a much simpler interface 
between the image and the VM than an executable AST would be.  I also 
wouldn't want the VM to depend on even the abstract syntax of 
Smalltalk, since this would make it much more difficult to experiment 
with targeting other languages to the Squeak VM - they'd have to be 
translated to a Smalltalk AST rather than compiled to a neutral 
bytecode.  My "Sorrow" concatenative compiler, for example, would have 
been much harder to write.

The stack machine is a valuable abstraction, I don't think we want to 
throw it away.

Avi