A fault tolerant software environment, in which various program components (e.g., portions of computer programs, applications, etc) are objectized into entities represented by "codons." This allows for improper syntax to occur, enabling, for example, combinatorial operations such as genetic programming. The present invention also contemplates such features as the ability to probabilistically execute individual codons, to switch between treating information as executable code or as data (or passing over it), provides that the individual codons can be tagged so that additional information can be associated with them, and provides for tagging of the stack.