Len,

>> One or other of us may be missing the point (it may be me) - but even in the
>> description you gave, there was nothing to contradict & a lot to confirm that
>> IL is "a proprietry representation of the symbol tables and tokens in a
>> manner optimised for the back-end executor" - the back-end executor just
>> happens to be a JIT compiler. There is no real reason why a JIT compiler
>> cannot be produced for p-code either.

The point you are missing is that IL isn't or doesn't contain the symbol tables you speak of. The compiler (C# or VB) will create symbol tables, parse trees, tokens etc. internally as part of its compilation process, however the output from the backend is meta-data and IL. The previous IL example source code shows the variables being accessed through a stack, pretty much like x86 assembly language.