[pwdisswordfish4]

No. If you must insist on thinking of them as distinct from native executables, then consider them foreign executable instead—object files written for a different machine architecture and a different loader convention. There's really no middle ground they're occupying.

[mlyle]

This is a very good way to put it.

The super pedant in me, of course, would say they're a sliver in the middle because they're targeted at running in a software-implemented VM instead of on a real machine architecture, and that this isn't all that different from in-memory interpreter bytecode or something like a .pyc written to disk...

But then something like the more complicated loaders for native executables is a sliver in the middle, too. And then you look at something like the AS/400 with super-high level "instructions" and these distinctions get super, super muddy.