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Exactly my thoughts. To further support your statement, theoretically, it should be possible to create a CPU that interprets C++ source code as machine code (not sure why would anyone do that though.)

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By that logic then PHP itself is also assembly because someone could make a machine that executes it natively. We might as well throw all distinctions away if we go down this road.

I'm not sure if I understand what you're trying to suggest. Indeed, someone could make a machine that executes PHP natively. It's a Turing-complete language, just like C++ or x86 assembly for that matter so it should be possible to build a (weak) universal machine that executes them directly.

My point is that what someone could create shouldn't have any bearing on the discussion. They are using c++ as an intermediate language, fine. Just because we could make a machine that executes it shouldn't alter that distinction. We can still call that compiling, but hypothesizing new machines doesn't help.

A better example is modern x86 CPUs. You feed them x86 instructions, but that is not the native language of the CPU; everything is translated into the real underlying (RISC) language as the x86 instructions are encountered.

Or so I'm told. I've never read Intel's source code :)

I doubt it would be this elegant ;-)

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