RE: [zzdev] :zz: Pilot Port -- 20k ????

[objsol <objsol@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thursday, January 28, 1999 9:36 AM, Ted Nelson [SMTP:ted@xxxxxxxxxx]
wrote:
> This seems to me extremely small.  Given that
>  users will want thousands of cells, and cells will
>  only be getting more overhead, perhaps this is
>  not yet the time for such a port.
> 
> Thoughts, anyone?

Although the Palm III has a limited amount of actual RAM available, the
entire free memory of the device is actually available to a program,
through the "database" functions.

There is a port of Smalltalk to the Palm that will allow the use of all
this RAM transparently. So all the RAM will be available for objects
(cells, etc.).

And it has the Smalltalk equivalent of hashes (Dictionary). Actually,
the Smalltalk Dictionary is more powerful than Perl5's hashes, as the
key can be anything, not just a string.

The resultant executables are quite small; there is currently about a
20-25K overhead for the runtime environment and a small debugger.

Current work is focused on making the virtual machine do both Java and
Smalltalk byte codes.

For more info, see http://www.tiac.net/users/ajb/pocketst/index.html

Ned Konz