(keitai-l) Re: Doja limitations

From: Benjamin Kowarsch <benjk_at_mac.com>
Date: 12/01/01
Message-Id: <6E39400A-E623-11D5-B3C4-003065501888@mac.com>
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