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Python Painfully Ported to Palm; Plan is "Peer-to-Peer"
An Anonymous Coward gave us the excuse for the above headline with this note: "Endeavors Technology has "successfully developed a highly optimized, open source port of Python to the Palm OS platform" It's called Pippy. The press release is also there. Nice!" Here's a story about the situation.
Python Palm-platform ported!
Poster perusing preliminary press-release ponders programming Perl-free PDAs.
Preppie people prefer Python; Perl pedantic.
Python port "Pippy" passable? Possible. PythonLabs prepared port perfectly.
P2P Python programs particularly pleasant.
(Poster pitches "P"-filled post pre- particularly pernicious puns.)
The mindset of Palm programmers seems to be morbidly similar to that of most Windows programmers - develop an app, release it as Shareware with a nag screen and 30-day trial period, then try to make a few bucks by selling your software on PalmGear, so any project to further open development for the Palm is a big step forward.
On the downside, it appears that it wants a device with at least 4MB of memory (Sorry III, V and 2MB Visor owners...) and it doesn't seem to have the ability to create standalone PRC files (thats a standalone application file).
Some of the other alternatives for developing directly on your Palm (no PC necessary; these read MemoPad or DOC files with your source):
Quartus Forth: A standalone Forth interpreter/compiler that is quite powerful; however, the free version can't compile PRCs, and it costs $70 to register.
LispMe is a Scheme compiler, licensed under the GPL. Yummy. Now we just need a better way to write parentheses in graffiti...
PocketC is an onboard C compiler, distributed as shareware.
And, one musn't forget the ever-helpful Palm OS Programmers FAQ