[rasjani]

Without actually knowing, i'd guess that would generate bytecode's that could be modified later by patching the resulting binary ?

I remember few buddies using similar pattern in ASM that just added n NOP's into code to allow patching and thus eliminating possible recompilation..

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I suspect that’s it.

There was a lot of self-modification, going on, in those days. Old machine language stuff had very limited resources, so we often modified code, or reused code space.