Re: palm perl porting, problems?

[John M. Dlugosz]

My friend at work just got one of those. He quickly ran out of space (8M), so he got a smart-card reader.

It seems that the OS doesn't address that directly as available memory. Files and programs have to be copied over to the main machine before they can be used.

Your Perl could be written to address its SV's etc. in this extended memory, even if it's not directly addressable. That is, you can do what it takes, in your code. I don't know what that means for performance. But Smart Media is, well, not known for its speed. CF is much better (lots more pins to connect with), but still slow (same as a 4X CD-ROM).

A Type-II CF card (the thicker one), which is what my Windows CE based PDA takes (I looked for that because it matches what my digital cameras use, so I already have (large) CF cards on hand), are available up to a Gigabyte (IBM Microdrive) for $400. The CF is basically an IDE hard disc emulation, so the size limit is the same as a PC hard disk (128G, in case you were wondering).

Nice job of research.

—John