[REBOL] Re: Embedded REBOL (Re: Population of PDA Users)
From: chrismorency:videotron:ca at: 11-Apr-2001 21:22
Hi,
jeff wrote:
Yes, the REBOL Palm port lives in a border town next to the
realm of
possibility". REBOL has even been compiled for
Palm before, but the problem is that in order for REBOL to
run (or even to boot) a segmentation paging scheme (virtual
memory) has to be used. Under such a scheme, page faults
would occur constantly. More time would be spent moving
memory than in being an interpreter. As you approach the
problem of a REBOL Palm port, it becomes increasingly
infeasible. "
Of course, I have to agree with you, the memory system in the Palm is surely
a limit. I've had my share of dealing with it ;)
The other approach is to hack the memory protection of Palm
OS. This isn't acceptable, though, because of the potential
for accidentally hurting other apps or data on the pda.
Unless it'll be only used for Rebol... but then again, what is the point of
having a Rebol-only PDA ?
There's still more issues, from Palm's event model and how
REBOL's works, potentially workable, but still an issue.
Please don't elaborate more, I know about that event model, and that
pseudo-multitasking behind a true-hackable-multitasking and I'll probably
have nightmares tonight ;-)
And how do you write scripts -- in graffiti?? Storing and
load scripts from the database?
Well I wouldn't write them using Graffiti that's for sure. But then again,
one could write them on his desktop and load them on it's PDA. I've actually
written several programs in OPL for the PsionS5 on the device itself and I
have big hands !
Anyhow, there were enough demonstrable problems with it that
we scrapped consideration of the Palm -- to the
disappointment of many.
Well, I can understand why the Rebol team has decided to put the development
of Rebol for the Palm on hold, but why not under EPOC ! At least for those
who can't stand owning a PDA running WindowsCE or any Microsoft's OS ;)
Best,
Chris
-jeff
