Hello,

> Could perl be turned into a VM kind of model?

As far as I know, that kind of thing may be possible one day. Even thought Perl and Java 's byte code isn't the same at all: Java's is low level (near from a real CPU) whereas Perl's is high level ('print' can be a node in the byte code tree, for example). In fact, I heard that Malcom Beattie was about doing that in his Perl compiler, and that would provide what you want.

However, this may not be done before a long time ... And moreover it is not sure that it will be really interesting: the Perl compiling time may be equivalent to the byte code loading time, and then what Perl does is the same: interpreting!! So I'm not sure Perl VM is going to be really efficient :-(( James