Oh this was in 2000, when virtualisation was only just becoming accessible so I can get of get the justification. It still made the entire exercise in writing some software feel pointless when I knew it would never get executed by anyone but myself.
Executing the code in your head removed from the nuances of hardware, CPU architecture and compiler versions seems like a virtuous pursuit (?)
…and that’s how we got Java :p
And stuff like Pascal, too, so it’s not all bad.