Language-specific CPUs was Re: uIEC/SD == AWESOME!

Chuck Guzis wrote: Sounds like Rick's saying that the interpreter essentially ran within the CPU's microcode though, rather than in any kind of external ROM. I'm really not sure where the distinction between assembly and 'not assembly' should lie, though. What does a stream of tokenised BASIC or Java bytecode count as? It's not the language in it's original (source) form, so the CPU doesn't "directly run" BASIC or Java (more like it runs assembled code, albeit using pretty coarse instructions). I'm not sure what the benefit would be in a CPU where human-readable source could be thrown at it, though; it'd likely be a lot less efficient than something requiring a compilation step. That doesn't mean someone hasn't tried. Heck, I suppose you could take a PC with some form of bidirectional data bus (a parallel port, say) which accepted whatever data you wanted - enact on the data fed to it and as a self-contained box, call the entire PC a "CPU". cheers Jules