Distribute Parse Trees, Not Bytecode

[Bill Frantz]

At 10:19 PM -0700 6/22/99, Ka-Ping Yee wrote:
>What we need is a format which avoids the entire compilation
>expense, represents the program compactly, yet still provides the
>ability to *present* the code as source.  And so the answer is to
>distribute signed parse trees (or, if you like, signed compressed
>parse trees).  This lets execution hosts skip a large chunk of the
>compilation cost, but still allows the runner of any program to
>see exactly the same source that the programmer wrote.  The
>machine running the program still has to emit code for it, but
>lots of implementations already do this work in a JIT anyway.

[+]Edward Felten, from the Princeton Safe Internet Programming team also
has suggested that the "object code" should be a parse tree.  That way, the
verifier does not need to reconstruct the program flow to perform the
verification.


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