pike fills a gap?

hi,

recently when describing pike i wrote the following:

pike is a classical all purpose language, which contrary to php or perl was designed from the beginning to write large complex applications. pike is rather fast because it is optimized strongly for the individual machines. (the produced bytecode is machine dependant, (contrary to eg python and java which produce machine independant bytecode, and are therefore slower))

(i hope that is correct)

interresting was a reply that said:

ah. this language closes the gap between compilerlanguages and unoptimized interpreted languages.

i have never looked at pike from this perspective sounds like an interresting observation.

what do you think?

greetings, martin.