Just a side remark. I wonder whether the byte-code approach is the best possible solution taking into account the overload of the decoder. Why not threaded code? The FORTH (and similar) experience, PostScript implementations, etc. show that this paradigm may be more interesting. Anyway, when you read for the first time the Talmud, ehmmm....., I mean the description of the STG machine by Simon PJ and others, you see that some of their ideas are not very far from code threading.
The classical FORTH style, with the separation between tha data and return stacks seems quite appropriate for easy implementations of higher-order control structures. If you saw the bells and whistles inside a FORTH processor implemented on 8bit machines, you would agree with me.
But I do not exclude the possibility that all this has been already discussed and rejected for some serious reasons...
Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Good remark, I just didn't think of the threaded approach. There is a reason Forth was popular on early desktop systems. I'd like to hear some arguments regarding the pros and cons of the threaded vs bytecode approaches! Björn