On Saturday, December 1, 2001, at 12:43 , Michael Turner wrote:
> There does seem to be a technology mismatch here. Java on phones like
> these
> is a little like having power steering and an automatic transmission for
> your lawnmower: You don't really need it, it doesn't help you cut
> grass, it
> really just gets in the way.
>
> But what should they have chosen instead? A Win32 API under WinCE?
> Then
> you depend on Microsoft's willingness to port to any CPU that you want
> in a
> phone. And anyway, Palmtop GUIs don't scale down nicely. You'd have
> to ask
> Microsoft for some real favors (or any other chosen palmtop OS vendor,
> for
> that matter.)
Once upon a time I was sitting on one of those standardisation
committees to standardise a programming language (in this case
Modula-2). Even then, with a language that was conceived as
minimalistic, there was the notion to put in more and more stuff as we
made "progress" towards the ISO standard.
However, occassionally we got reminded of how soon that extra stuff
would get in the way by one of the delegates, whose name escapes me now,
but he had a company called Itsy-Bitsy Computer Systems (no joke) and
specialised in firmware for truly amazingly minimalistic machines, and
his tool was M2.
He complained when we wanted to make a 128bit extra precision floating
point data type mandatory for standard conformance ... I still remember
his words "Don't you dare do that ... on some of my machines 128 bits is
all the RAM I have got".
Maybe the phone vendors should have adopted Itsy-Bitsy's minimalistic
Modula-2 implementation and make a JIT compiler for it :-) Niklaus Wirth
would have been delighted ;-) but then he didn't work for Sun.
I would probably have recommended to build a CPU based on the Novix 4000
design (IIRC), the native assembly language (no microcode interpreter)
of which is Forth and which had very impressive performance specs at the
time. It allowed for very complex programs on astonishingly small
footprints and at least the Japanese manufacturers would have probably
felt very much at home with a postfix notation based language like
Forth, as in "Today" <push> make-context <push> "Wife" <push> by <push>
"Ketai" <push> make-object <push> buy <push> make-passive <push>
make-past-tense <eval> or in Japanese "Kyo ha kannai ni keitai wo katte
kuremashita". Aren't stacks just beautiful ? :-)
Can I have a UMTS transceiver unit for that old HP calculator please ...
rgds
benjamin
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Received on Sat Dec 1 08:24:59 2001