One big problem with porting anything Unix-ish to the Palm is its segmented memory architecture. Memory lives in segments that can only be up to 64K (it was, I believe, 32K in earlier versions of the PalmOS). Because of this, anything that has big tables (like the yacc-based parser in Perl) would have to be re-written to accomodate the chunked memory.

Additionally, there are lots of Unix-isms in the Perl source code. Like assuming that you have files, for instance, or directories. Or, for that matter, that there are standard streams connected to a spawned program.

I looked at porting Perl to the Windows/CE OS and found that the Unix-isms would have taken some working around. The current port of Perl to WinCE provides its own console so it can simulate file redirection (which doesn't exist on PocketPC architecture).

You may be better off looking at one of the cross-compiler environments if you just want to write Palm apps (I'd recommend PocketSmalltalk, but that's just one of many).

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.