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Old February 24th 14, 01:34 AM posted to comp.sys.intel,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips,alt.windows7.general
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Default How many x86 instructions?

On Sun, 23 Feb 2014 17:15:24 -0600, BillW50 wrote:

On 2/23/2014 4:41 PM, charlie wrote:
The front panel on many of the old mainframes and minicomputers allowed
direct entry of machine code, and was usually used to manually enter
such things as a "bootstrap", or loader program.


The way I recall is any computer only understands machine code and
nothing else. Anything else must be converted to machine at some point.


That sorta the meaning of the word "machine" in "machine code". ;-)

The issue is how the programs are stored, in the mean time. If the
machine code is never "seen" in the wild, it's an interpreter. If the
machine code is stored somewhere it's either "assembled" or
"compiled". The major difference being that an "assembled" program
has a 1:1 correspondence to its machine code, a "compiled" program
will not. Of course a "macro" assembler confuses this point some.