http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=286314


in reply to Installing Perl on the Sharp Zaurus PDA

/me sighs...

Are there any Perl ports to the PalmOS? There haven't been any the last time I looked (well, there was an empty sourceforge project IIRC, but it seemed dead for a long time).

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Re: Re: Installing Perl on the Sharp Zaurus PDA
by batkins (Chaplain) on Aug 25, 2003 at 12:11 UTC
    It hasn't been done yet, and I don't know if it ever will be done. The PalmOS provides programs with something like 2K of stack (that may not be the number, but it was definitely something ridiculous). PalmOS applications also have a very small amount of RAM allocated for their use, something like a few hundred K. Most perl programs can't handle these kinds of constraints.

    Also, the entire PalmOS API is non-standard - malloc and free are replaced with Mem* functions; any math functions have to be used from MathLib, which has to be dynamically loaded in, and which may or may not be available on the user's machine. Further, there's no filesystem per se on the Palm platform - just a bunch of databases. Accessing distinct records from a Perl application would probably require some kind of modification of Perl, or at the very least an ugly hack.

    So in other words, don't hold your breath. :)

    BTW, if any of those memory figures were incorrect, please let me know.


    it says she can do math, but will she recognize 8 / 0?

    We can only hope they've put in those safeguards.

    Worst case scenario: She succeeds in dividing by zero, and suddenly little Tiphany-Amber's bedroom becomes the center of a howling vortex of nonspace, frying the neighborhood with sparkling discharges of zero-point energy.

    - slashdot