[Haskell-cafe] Haskell and palm pilots.

Matthew Roberts mattr at ics.mq.edu.au
Tue Jan 25 08:26:31 EST 2005


There was work done on haskell for the palmos done my Tony Sloane and 
Matt Tarnawski at Macquarie University.

In the end, Matt mangaged to demonstrate a working palm runtime (based 
on nhc I believe) but in the process discovered all kinds of reasons 
trying to get a haskell interpreter on a palm pilot was going to be 
trouble.  The work at macquarie on palms and haskell now centers on 
using Haskell as a language to aid programming for the palm - not for 
controlling the palm directly.  Instead of creating palm apps in 
haskell (requiring the runtime) the preferred option is to generate 
c-code from haskell code.

Two senior academics at Macquarie have a (probably rare?) combination 
of interests - palm and haskell - and as a result there is some really 
interesting research being done.  Stay tuned - you should see most of 
the really interesting stuff in the communities report, but if you want 
more info, or you are working in this area yourself......

matt

On 25/01/2005, at 4:31 AM, John Goerzen wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 04:48:49PM +0000, Graham Klyne wrote:
>> At 20:15 21/01/05 +0000, John Goerzen wrote:
>>> I have built a fixed Hugs for the Zaurus PDA running the OpenZaurus
>>> distribution.  Download here:
>>> http://quux.org/devel/zaurus/hugs_hugs98-Nov2003-r1_arm.ipk
>>
>> Cool!
>>
>> I've often thought Haskell should be a good language for programming 
>> PDA
>> functions, as a kind of super-calculator.  Now I've seen versions 
>> mentioned
>> for two PDAs, but no Palm yet.
>
> Out of curiosity, do you know what the other PDA is?
>
> I suspect the reason there's nothing for Palm is because one probably
> can't just port to it in the normal sense.  For isntance, until
> recently, PalmOS had no notion of a filesystem, though it does have
> simplistic database functions built in and a type/creator thing similar
> to older versions of MacOS.  Memory is also quite constrained on many
> Palms, and I think management is different than in standard C, but I'm
> not certain of that.
>
> The port to Zaurus is easy because it is a real OS (Linux) on it.  Even
> comes with a terminal emulator.  And one can run Debian or X
> (www.pdaxrom.org) on it, too.  It's a good PDA for a geek :-)
>
> -- John
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