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Perl For The Palm?
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?
...that I found via Google. The guy mentions that it would probably be over 2MB if it happened, but that wouldn't be a problem for someone with an 8MB Palm, or even a 4MB. I know I'd take out some of the games on my almost full Palm IIIx to make room for Perl if it was ported.
Perl's footprint would be one problem. Its architecture would be another.
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.