Perl For The Palm? 7
Ravagin asks: "OK, I'm trying to teach myself Perl, and I'm doing fairly well, but I'd like to be able to take it with me, as it were. I've got a Palm IIIxe and a Palm Portable Keyboard, and was wondering if there was a port of Perl to the Palm OS (as there is with C and BASIC)? It doesn't seem to me that it would be extremely difficult. And before you say it, my C skills are way too primitive to do it myself. The Ten Perl Myths Page says it's in the works, but that's from a year ago. None of the major palm software sites have anything, but is someone perhaps working on it?" Wow! Now this is something that would actually get me to dust off my (unused) Palm VII. Of course, you'd have to do quite a bit of coding to get a Perl interpreter (and base modules) to fit in 2 megs or less. Porters might have better luck with the 8MB Palm models but even that's kinda tight. Do any of you see Perl on the Palm platform anytime soon, or is it a pipe dream?
Something a bit more recent... (Score:2)
Re:Something a bit more recent... (Score:1)
The IIIxe has 8 meg, and I use a bit over half of that, but I could be convinced to take off SolarWars and some of my bigger docs to make room.
I don't quite follow what he did, but if it could fit perl in 2-3 megs, there would definitiely be some takers.
-J
Python close enough? (Score:1)
Why not try out Python for the Palm instead? Python can do pretty much the same stuff Perl can do and some people even prefer it!
Slashdot did a Story [slashdot.org] on it recently.
Speed would be a problem too. (Score:2)
PalmOS devices use a 16-20 MHz 68000-family CPU, similar to a Mac of almost 15 years ago. Perl isn't an interpreter. It's a compiler. And it's a much more complex language, even without any modules, than the Tiny C and Forth compilers out there for the Palm.
So even if you somehow give a Palm enough RAM to work with (say, 16MB at minimum), you're still running it on something with less than half the horsepower of a 1988-vintage 386-based PC, what with the slow RAM and the CPU's roles in driving the LCD and polling the input devices. In other words, even if you did it, you'd probably be able to brew a pot of coffee while a 20-line script ran.
Re:Python close enough? (Score:1)
Python is not perl. If you want something close to python that is more mature, I suggest PocketSmalltalk.
PERL? (Score:1)
Perl for the Palm? (Score:1)
Considering how complex Perl is, I doubt that someone would be able to make a compiler for it that would be under 2 megs. Add that to the overhead it would need to interpret the bytecode, any conceivable complete implementation would be useless on any Palm released to date. Add to that the fact that the Motorola Dragonball processor that lives at the heart of all Palm Computing Devices is slower than any computer that ever possessed a Perl system to date, and it's even more worthless.
Much more useful would be a Perl system that accepted only a small subset of the full Perl language, but deciding what subset to use is the big trick. Getting rid of associative arrays and the OOP cruft bolted on Perl might be useful, but it's probably insufficient to simplify the language enough.
That is, unless someone finds an innovative way of structuring the compiler/interpreter system of Perl, just like the 8-bit JVM which ran on /. a while back, but it's too much to be hoping for, I believe.