interpreter, there is no output. Threaded code is a formatting style for compiled code that minimizes memory use. Instead of writing out every step of an operation at its every occurrence in the program, as was common in macro assemblers for instance, the compiler writes each common bit of code into a subroutine. Thus, each bit exists in only one place in memory (see "Don't repeat yourself"). The top-level application in these programs may consist of nothing but subroutine calls. Many of these subroutines, in turn, also consist of nothing but lower-level subroutine calls. Mainframes and some early microprocessors such as the RCA 1802 required several instructions to call a subroutine. In the top-level application and in many subroutines, that sequence is constantly repeated, with only the subroutine address changing from one call to the next. This means that a program consisting of many function calls may have considerable amounts of repeated code as well. To address this, threaded code systems used pseudo-code to represent function calls in a single operator. At run time, a tiny "interpreter" would scan over the top-level code, extract the subroutine's address in memory, and call it. In other systems, this same basic concept is implemented as a branch table, dispatch table, or virtual method table, all of which consist of a table of subroutine addresses. During the 1970s, hardware designers spent considerable effort to make subroutine calls faster and simpler. On the improved designs, only a single instruction is expended to call a subroutine, so the use of a pseudo-instruction saves no room. Additionally, the performance of these calls is almost free of additional overhead. Today, though almost all programming languages focus on isolating code into subroutines, they do so for code clarity and maintainability, not to save space. Threaded code systems save room by replacing that list of function calls, where only the subroutine address changes from one call to the next, with a list of execution tokens, which are essentially function calls with the call opcode(s) stripped off, leaving behind only a list of addresses. Over the years, programmers have created many variations on that "interpreter" or "small selector". The particular address in the list of addresses may be extracted using an index, general purpose register or pointer. The addresses may be direct or indirect, contiguous or non-contiguous (linked by pointers), relative or absolute, resolved at compile time or dynamically built. No