[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.