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Its main property then is usually that of being similar to, but at the same time usually far less complex and bit-twiddly than, machine code (as well as traditionally interpreted or JIT-compiled rather than being directly run on a piece of hardware). <span style="font-size: smaller;" class="autosigned">—Preceding [[Wikipedia:Signatures|unsigned]] comment added by [[Special:Contributions/174.18.204.116|174.18.204.116]] ([[User talk:174.18.204.116|talk]]) 18:56, 2 October 2009 (UTC)</span><!-- Template:UnsignedIP --> <!--Autosigned by SineBot-->
The focus should probably be on 'byte-oriented', in the sense of simplifying instruction decoding. The op-code is only one of several fields -- it is not a great benefit if the op-code is easy to extract, while other fields are complex. I've always thought the instruction encoding used for the EM-1 'machine' was a good example: opcode is one byte, escape sequence is one byte, and address fields is one or two bytes. There are a few exceptions where the instructions and arguments were encoded into one byte, but this was to speed execution of very common instructions. (See Informatica Report IR-81 (from 1983) by Andrew S Tanenbaum et al.: Description of a machine architecture for use with block structured languages.) Although the term 'bytecode' is not used by the authors, it has been used in descriptions of the Amsterdam Compiler Kit, of which EM-1 was a central concept.[[User:Athulin|Athulin]] ([[User talk:Athulin|talk]]) 09:46, 10 January 2011 (UTC)
==Layman's terms==
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