E.g. since the MAME project considers itself living documentation of arcade hardware, it would be more properly classified as a simulator. While the goal of most other video game emulators is just to play the games.
It just feels that one is emulator if its philosophy is "it just works" and simulator if "well sit down kids I am going to give you proper documentation and how it was built back in my days"
but I wonder what that means for programs themselves...
I wonder if simulator==emulator is more truer than what javascript true conditions allow.
The goals merely overlap, which is obvious. Equally obviously, if two goals are similar, then the implimentations of some way to attain those goals may equally have some overlap, maybe even a lot of overlap. And yet the goals are different, and it is useful to have words that express aspects of things that aren't apparent from merely the final object.
A decorative brick and a structural brick may both be the same physical brick, yet if the goals are different then any similarity in the implimentation is just a coincidense. It would not be true to say that the definition of a decorative brick includes the materials and manufacturing steps and final physical properties of a structural brick. The definition of a decorative brick is to create a certain appearance, by any means you want, and it just so happens that maybe the simplest way to make a wall that looks like a brick wall, is to build an actual brick wall.
If only they had tried to make it clear that there is overlap and the definitions are grey and fuzzy and open to personal philosophic interpretation and the one thing can often look and smell and taste almost the same as the other thing, if only they had said anything at all about that, it might have headed off such a pointless confusion...
Calling the same thing a different name.
In practice the terms are often conflated.
Intepreter either writes it in bytecode and then executes the bytecode line by line ?
Atleast that is what I believe the difference is , care to elaborate , is there some hidden joke of compiler vs intepreter that I don't know about ?
definitely agree on simulator though!
It is a tiny distinction, but generally I'd say that a simulator tries to accurately replicate what happens on an electrical level as good one can do.
While an emulator just does things as a black box ... input produces the expected output using whatever.
You could compare it to that an accurate simulator of a 74181 tries to do it by using AND/OR/NOT/... logic, but an emulator does it using "normal code".
In HDL you have a similar situation between structural, behavioral design ... structural is generally based on much more lower level logic (eg., AND/NOR/.. gates ...), and behavioral on higher logic (addition, subtraction ...).
"100%" accuracy can be achieved with both methods.
