Python for the Palm(tm) Computing Platform

[Markus Kohler]

bgdarnel at my-deja.com (Ben Darnell) writes:

> In article <3813F1B7.49D49499 at mincom.com>, Martin Pool wrote:
> >(I think that subject keeps 3Com's lawyers happy. ;-)
> >
> >Has anybody worked on porting the Python interpreter to these
> >handhelds?  
> >
> >After thinking about it a little it seemed it should be possible to cut
> >Python back enough to fit into a fairly small amount of memory. 
>                                   ^^^^^^
> Unfortunately, Palm devices have an unfairly small amount of memory.  On
> a Palm III, a running application gets 4k of stack space, and 36k of
> dynamic heap (i.e. what malloc and free operate on).  The rest of the
> device's memory is protected, and can only be accessed by calling the
> Data Manager functions.  I'm not familiar with CPython's internals, but
> it seems that it would be very difficult to fit within those
> constraints.  On top of that, you've got a 16 mHz m68k processor, so
> performance is not going to be very good.
> 

As far as I know there is a trick to get around this limitation. 
Look at PocketSmalltalk an implementation of Smalltalk for the
Pilot :
http://www.tiac.net/users/ajb/pocketst/index.html. 

Markus
-- 
Markus Kohler  mailto:markus_kohler at hp.com

"Love what you do.  Success requires passion."
Carly Fiorina, CEO Hewlett-Packard