Machine-independent intermediate languages

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <970 at l.cc.purdue.edu> cik at l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
-A portable assembler should have the property that anything which the machine
-can do can be relatively easily described in the language in such a way that
-the resulting object code does what the programmer, understanding the machine
-instructions, timing, and limitations, wants it to do, and how he wants it
-done.

I defy you to come up with one that can be used for all of:
IBM System/38, Burroughs B6700, Motorola MC68000, Intel iAPX432.
Yet C and LISP are (barely) doable for all these architectures.