[jrockway]

Many languages go so far as to specify a virtual machine to run the compiled program, so your statement doesn't make much sense in that context. Languages, machines, libraries and implementation are all deeply interconnected. Try writing C without a stack. Try writing Java without java.lang.

[benbataille]

Thank you for brilliantly proving his point. What you wrote just prove that you completely mixed what is a language and what is its implementation.

Of course C semantic uses a calling stack in its definition. Does that mean you need a physical stack to implement it ? Not at all, you can perfectly implement C in anything as long as you can simulate a stack. Just look at the JVM and Dalvik. Dalvik is register based while the JVM is stack-based and they both run Java.

java.lang is a standard library. It's only part of the language definition in a really broad sense. It's actually written in Java. Any complete Java compiler can and will compile it (with some modification for the purely JVM oriented functions). There is a lot of projects out there trying to compile Java on a target which is not the JVM.

[pjmlp]

You just prove my point.

Of course languages define virtual machines, or in languages like C the abstract machine model, but that is only how the developer sees the machine through the language semantics.

This does not change in any way whatsoever how the language is actually implemented.

[microtonal]

This discussion is derailing. From the top-level comment:

Hopefully it would allow everyone to realize that a language is just some syntax and semantic and that a compiler is just a program like another.

Which is true. However, this glosses over the fact that it is prohibitively hard to write efficient compilers for some languages. For instance, Prolog's semantics are so far removed from our machines that it is terribly hard to make it efficient for general purpose programs.

Semantics do make some languages harder to compile to efficient machine code than others.

[ShaunK]

I think it is usually easy to determine by context when someone is referring to a language and when someone is referring to the typical implementation, libraries, etc that come along with a language. In the context of performance benchmarking it is clear (to me at least) that the benchmark would be of a particular implementation, of which there is usually an obvious choice. I don't think there is really any misunderstanding of that.