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[REBOL] Re: REBOL for Pocket PC

From: brian::hawley::net at: 9-May-2004 16:25

Hi Stuart! The answer is yes, sort-of. Core 2.5.0.15.5 will work, with some caveats: - This is a WinCE 2.0 program. It will run on later versions of WinCE but it still looks a little archaic. - WinCE has no concept of a current directory at all. REBOL HOME is thus the root directory, and that is where it looks for %user.r - I usually put a token %user.r that changes system/options/home to my preferred directory and calls my real %user.r there. Once in REBOL, the setting that REBOL treats like a current directory (system/script/path) works just fine. - It was written to support Handheld PC, not Pocket PC. This normally wouldn't matter, but in this case it means that the window doesn't resize when the onscreen keyboard is shown. Instead the onscreen keyboard covers the REBOL input prompt. You better remember what you typed. I'm sorry about this one - it's probably my fault. I'm the one that requested the StrongARM port in the first place and there's no onscreen keyboard on my HP820, just an old- fashioned physical one. - There is no clipboard support. Not the clipboard:// port, not even Ctrl-C Ctrl-V in the user interface. This means that you have to type stuff in. My advice: Install a text editor (Pocket PC doesn't come with one, just a formatted word processor) and type out your scripts ahead of time, and use short file names because you'll have to type them out every time. Command history does work though. - There is no support for command line arguments to REBOL, nor is there support for stdio or redirection. You have to start REBOL and then do scripts yourself, hence the short file names. This means that you can't associate the REBOL executable with the .r file type and double-tap on script files. - There is no support for CGI, so you can't install a simple web server to have REBOL act as a proxy processor. You can run REBOL server scripts though. WinCE doesn't map the localhost name to 127.0.0.1 by default, but the IP works fine and there are third-party tools that you can use to change the hosts settings. - It wasn't particularly well optimized, so it runs slower than the equivalent Windows version on comparable hardware. In particular, decent floating point code for ARM didn't exist back then really. Other operations are slower too. - It uses the same amount of RAM as the Windows version, more than 4 MB. That's a lot on an embedded platform. I actually don't know if you can run more than one copy at the same time because I've never run it on a computer with enough RAM to run it more than once, but I haven't heard that you can't in principle. - REBOL doesn't support Unicode on any platform, and Unicode is what WinCE uses for text. Be sure that the text editor you install for writing scripts supports plain ASCII text. Given all that, REBOL runs great on WinCE. I've sent feedback over the years requesting clipboard and command line support; I probably should send one about the window-resizing-for-onscreen-keyboard thing. I've even made a request that REBOL/Base be ported to WinCE because of its lower memory requirements. All requests were considered to be important by Carl, who wants WinCE support as much as I do. However, they won't be fixed until View 1.3 and Mac OSX support are done. Understandable priorities. I hope this helps! Brian Hawley At 11:15 PM 5/8/04 -0400, you wrote: