Instruction-coated translation: An approach to restructure directly threaded interpreters with low cohesion

A directly threaded interpreter is used to speedup the virtual instruction dispatch. It is composed of translation and interpretation functions. It has low cohesion naturally due to the use of "label as value". This paper presents a restructuring method to envelop the translation function as a new virtual instruction to make the directly threaded interpreter have a single interpreting task and have high cohesion. The reformed translation is named as the instruction-coated translation, a term similar to sugar-coated tablet.