palm?

[Tony Sloane]

John Meacham wrote:
> This may be an intractable goal, but is any project out there
anywhere
> close to a working haskell 98(ish) implementation for the Palm
Pilot?
>
> There would probably have to be some compromises, like 16 bit Ints
and
> perhaps some other restrictions, but i don't think its impossible to
get
> some sort of lazy implementation to work on such a resource starved
> architecture so has anyone given it a shot?

Here at Macquarie University we have done some work on this.  Matthew
Tarnawsky  ported the nhc98 runtime to the Palm as part of his 2002
honours project working with myself and Dom Verity.  With this port
it's possible to compile programs on a desktop machine and load the
bytecode onto a Palm for execution.  There is a limited interface to
the Palm GUI libraries.

Having said that, there is much to be done.  The current
implementation has only been lightly tested and there are a number of
design decisions that we want to revisit, particularly relating to how
garbage collection works.  We are starting to port the work to a
recent version of nhc98 and are looking at some of these questions.

We hope to have something for others to play with in a few months.
Stay tuned to this list for an announcement.

Cheers,
Tony Sloane

--
Senior Lecturer
Dept of Computing, Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia